Only The Lonely

 

 

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

(Cannongate)

 

“I want to be alone”, is the line that made Greta Garbo legendary rather than just famous, and it gives her a walk on part in Olivia Laing’s fascinating study of loneliness, something we all experience, but don’t fully understand.

She appears as a sort of living urban myth clad in a fur coat and men’s shoes wandering the streets of New York still looking for the solitude that she professed to want so badly. Decades after the cameras stopped turning, she was still being hunted by people keen to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous recluse.

Laing describes in this sensitive and learned book the conundrum at the centre being alone, that it is a both a spiritual and physical experience. You can be surrounded by people and feel utterly disconnected from life.

Drawing on a wide range of references including social science, psychology, and the arts, as well as her personal experience of solitude, Laing explores this curious state and the impact it has had on individuals and wider culture.

Touching in the process on the paintings of Edward Hopper and the multi-media adventures of Andy Warhol, both of whom fashioned careers that brought them critical approbation and lasting fame from art that was rooted in their deep personal loneliness. She also draws on the New York subculture of the sixties through to the nineties that provided a place of acceptance for a disparate community of artists, musicians, and party animals until first AIDS and then gentrification swept it away.

Loneliness, as the truism goes, is something that anyone can feel, but it cuts deepest into the lives of those who have already been pushed to the outside by the narrow constraints of mainstream society. Some may be able to parlay the dislocation into creativity; many more end up trying and failing to self-medicate against it through unwise personal choices.

In an age when the devices that supposedly connect us seem to be actively working to drive us apart, we are all starting to feel a bit like Hopper’s Nighthawks. If you’re sat at a diner counter looking for the meaning of your existential angst in the dregs of your coffee, The Lonely City might help to explain your situation.