The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.

Yes

Forestalling criticism is something we all do in small ways, but the commitment and thoroughness of Warhol’s intensification of his flaws is very rare, attesting both to his courage and his extreme fear of rejection.

More recent research, particularly with bullied children, suggests that the targets of social rejection are often those who are deemed either too aggressive or too anxious and withdrawn. Unhappily, these are precisely the behaviours that arise from insecure or inadequate attachment or from early episodes of isolation. What this means in practice is that children who have had problematic attachment experiences are far more likely to suffer episodes of rejection than their peers, establishing patterns of loneliness and withdrawal that can continue entrenching well into adulthood.

But what the physiological account of loneliness elides is the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange. This is the other driver of loneliness, the reason why certain people – often the most vulnerable and needy of connection – find themselves permanently on the threshold, if not cast entirely beyond the pale.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.