The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing (Picador, 2016).
“When you have no-one, no-one can hurt you”. The bleak lyrics by Will Oldham from ‘You Will Miss Me When I Burn’ by Palace Brothers are hardly life affirming. Olivia Laing takes a more positive line from Dennis Wilson’s ‘Thoughts of You’ in which the Beach Boy sings how “Loneliness is a very special place”.
However, I doubt that many people equate loneliness with specialness. Most of the time it’s a condition that generates feelings of shame, self loathing and depression. The invisible cloak we wear is a burden rather than a protection.
The ‘adventures’ of Olivia Laing’s compassionate and insightful book nevertheless show how being alone can be, and has been, the stimulus to greater self knowledge and the impetus towards personal creativity.
Olivia Laing
This doesn’t mean that the condition is a bag of laughs. “What does it feel like to be lonely?” Laing asks rhetorically and offers this bleakly concise answer: “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”.
She also quotes a definition of loneliness by Harry Stack Sullivan: ‘the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy’.
This certainly fits with my own experience as an English man (‘un staniero’) living in Italy. As an English woman in America, Laing is right to observe that “in certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure” but this doesn’t mean it’s any easier to ignore the need to share thoughts, experiences and feelings.
These days, more and more, this sharing takes place in the virtual reality of cyberspace. Yet although life in the digital age enables us to be technologically connected, this often only emphasizes rather than cures our emotional isolation. Engaging with real people may be messy and frustrating but it is still preferable to being enraptured by a machine.
David Wojnarowicz
Laing’s wide-ranging study is partly autobiographical but primarily draws consolation and inspiration from the lives of urban artists, activists and various troubled souls.
There are chapters devoted to Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz and the reclusive writer and outsider artist Henry Darger. Aside from reflections on Warhol’s would be killer Valerie Solanas and references to Greta Garbo, her chosen subjects are male. Personally I would have liked to learn her more thoughts on lonely women.
Perhaps the reason for this imbalance lies in Laing’s attitude to gender and sexuality which is far from straightforward. “God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body” she laments and hints at being Gender Fluid when she adds “I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I’d been assigned”. This certainly helps explain her strong empathy with the gay community and why she is so moved and enraged by the ravages of the AIDS virus.
And it’s the need for community and tolerance of difference which,ultimately, ties together all these stories. “We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated”, she writes.
Above all, her plea is for loneliness to be de-stigmatized and understood : “it does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive”.
Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely. It’s a measure of our humanity.
Perhaps, after all, loneliness is a special place to be.
