Olivia Laing

"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Olivia Laing explores these questions by travelling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists, among them Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger and Klaus Nomi. Part memoir, part biography, part dazzling work of cultural criticism, The Lonely City is not just a map, but a celebration of the state of loneliness. It's a voyage out to a strange and sometimes lovely island, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but visited by many - millions, say - of souls"--

Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The Lonely City

deniz

If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.

the incommunicability of loneliness; how common it is in art yet how difficult it is to admit to the sinking nature of it to someone. maybe if we could talk about loneliness more; we would be feeling it less. the empathy we have towards loneliness isn't actual empathy, it's a recalling of past experiences, a dive into that dark memory. we are societal animals, yet loneliness is an epidemic that  travels through cities and sinks into souls. it isn't loud, but happiness is, company is. loneliness is quiet, therefore less visible, although definitely more common than happiness in our concrete society. that's why we see it the most in art. because what cannot be conveyed in sheer words can be conveyed through the eye of the soul; which is art, in all of its forms.

Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.

This almost exact thing happened to me recently and I felt the s(h)ame.

Dora Tominic

Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: 'Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person's empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person's loneliness.'

When I read those lines, I remembered sitting, years back, outside a train station in the south of England, waiting for my father. It was a sunny day, and I had a book I was enjoying. After a while, an elderly man sat down next to me and tried repeatedly to strike up conversation. I didn't want to talk and after a brief exchange of pleasentries I began to respond more tersely until eventually, still smiling, he got up and wandered away. I've never stopped feeling ashamed about my unkindness, and nor have I ever forgotten how it felt to have force field of his loneliness pressed against me: an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen.

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