The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

It just didn't work for me, it wasn't what I wanted. The book spends a lot of time on four men who symbolize loneliness in different ways. Maybe this would have been interesting if I'd had an interest in any of them, but I didn't. The author did talk about her own encounter with loneliness, which was exactly what I was wanting, but too little of the book was given over to it. I had to concentrate intensely on each sentence to make a connection with it, and by page 75 my eyes were sliding down through the paragraphs, picking up a few sentences and not caring one way or another. This book was not for me.

My review is not indicative of the quality I found the book to be of, but rather my experience reading it. I had this book very very oft suggested to me and others in my demographic, so I really went in hoping to experience some company in the endeavor of loneliness. What I was not expecting, was the book to be about so much other than that. The vast majority of the book was written about the loneliness of several artists throughout the modern era and while those stories were at time captivating and interesting, for a lot of the book I felt like just saying...Okay, go off queen, but what are we saying all this for, again? I found the book lacked a focus that I was expecting from it. Again, while well written and articulated especially I just don't think this book was at all what I was expected and I unfortunately did not leave this feeling any better or relieved about loneliness.

This was not what I expected. Instead of a personal memoir interspersed with stats and psychological findings on loneliness in cities, the author focuses on reducing artists' lives and careers down to the fact that they were lonely in nature. It is well written, but there is something about the language of art interpretation that makes me scream “show me the facts”. I made it a third in, but I'll stop now and shelve this as DNF.

I had a dream last night in which I was walking through this city, but in my dream, the city was empty. In my dream, there were no people, no traffic, no conversation. The streets were deserted, the city, quiet.

I was alone; I was not, however, lonely.

Loneliness is something that is acute in cities. This truth, as explored in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City, is perhaps explained by the idea of being surrounded by people but yet being alone. Isolation is more piercing when we feel disconnected, knowing that connection and community are in front of your face, yet so far away.

I rarely feel lonely these days, even when I am alone. The cold edifice of the urban landscape feels warm to me, but I know my experience is unusual. Ms. Laing's experience is perhaps more typical: the columns of the city act as metaphorical dividers. This urban solitude has been reflected in art and media for generations.

The Lonely City is part memoir, part exploration of the art that loneliness inspires; it is a reminder that proximity does not equal connection, that density can cause isolation. It is a reminder that the city, even when completely deserted in our dreams, builds walls between us. Overcoming these literal and figurative walls is the challenge of our urban life.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)

In The Lonely City, the author explores artists whose work and/or lives represent urban loneliness—Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanis, David Wojnarowicz—during a lonely time in her life.

The last paragraphs of the book are very moving:

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars.... But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting? About desire? ...About experiencing unhappiness? Why this need... to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turning inward from the world at large?

“In her discussion about [her sewn fiber-art piece] ‘Strange Fruit,' Zoe Leonard made a statement about this business of imperfection, about the way life is made up of endless failures of intimacy, endless errors and separations that anyway culminate only with loss. ‘At first, the sewing was a way to think about David [Wojnarowicz]. I'd think about the things I'd like to repair and all the things I'd like to put back together.... After awhile, I began thinking about loss itself.... All the friends I'd lost. All the mistakes I've made. The inevitability of a scarred life.... The attempt to sew it back together. This mending... provided something for me. Maybe just time or the rhythm of sewing. I haven't been able to change anything in the past,... but I've been able to experience my love and loss in a measured and continuous way. To remember.'

“There are so many things that art can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life. It can't mend arguments between friends.... All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions.... It does have a capacity to create intimacy. It does have a way of healing wounds. And better yet, of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing, and not all scars are ugly. If I sound adamant, it's because I'm speaking from personal experience.... The way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing, by way of this contact, the fact that loneliness, longing does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities. And there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions, too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect.... We are fed the notion that all difficult feelings—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment. Of doing time... in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone.... I think it's about two things: Learning how to befriend yourself, and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are, in fact, a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion which can and should be resisted. 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 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.”