The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

‘peculiarly insistent’; ‘an almost eerie affliction of the spirits’ – loneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia, so that when a person is no longer lonely they struggle to remember what the condition is like.

If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed.

‘A true community consists of individuals – not mere species members, not couples – respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally – free spirits in free relation to each other – and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends’

You don’t emerge from a childhood like that without baggage, without a sense of toxic burdens, which have to be somehow concealed or carried or otherwise disposed of.

‘There was no way I could relate them to anybody in a room full of people at any party anywhere,’ he told his friend Keith Davis in a taped conversation years later. ‘The sense of carrying experiences on my shoulder, where I could sit there and look at people and realize there was just no frame of reference that was similar to theirs.’ And again in Close to the Knives: ‘I could barely speak when in the company of other people. There was never a point in conversations at work, parties or gatherings when I could reveal what I’d seen.’

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.