Overall Favorite Books
of 2016
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1.
THE LONELY CITY
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“You are born alone. You die alone. The value
of the space in between is trust and love,” artist
Louise Bourgeoise wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life
as she contemplated how
solitude enriches creative work. It’s
a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace
solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness
has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For
if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably
wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and]
one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream
becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives.
How to break free of that prison and
reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores
in The
Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort
of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is
for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a
lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical
and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as
“a populated place: a city in itself.”
After the sudden collapse of a romance marked
by extreme elation, Laing left her native England and took her shattered heart
to New York, “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass.” The daily,
bone-deep loneliness she experienced there was both paralyzing in its
all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to aliveness.
Indeed, her choice to leave home and wander a foreign city is itself a rich
metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts
restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a voluntary vagabond and a
catatonic recluse all at once, yet somehow a vitalizing laboratory for
self-discovery. The pit of loneliness, she found, could “drive one to consider
some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.”
She writes:
There were things that burned away at
me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our
pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not
intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other
people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for
loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered
deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology
helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind
screens?
Bedeviled by this acute emotional anguish,
Laing seeks consolation in the great patron saints of loneliness in
twentieth-century creative culture. From this eclectic tribe of the lonesome —
including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday,
and Nan Goldin — Laing chooses four artists as her companions charting the
terra incognita of loneliness: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and
David Wojnarowicz, who had all “grappled in their lives as well as work with
loneliness and its attendant issues.”
Laing examines the particular, pervasive form
of loneliness in the eye of a city aswirl with humanity:
Imagine standing by a window at night, on the
sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals
itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some
flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro,
attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you
can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any
city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of
loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.
You
can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness
that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might
think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of
other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a
sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and
unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be
lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily
require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection,
closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much
intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as
a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder,
then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.
There is, of course, a universe of difference
between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations
toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak
of “fertile
solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in
apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to signal an existential failing
— a social stigma the nuances of which Laing addresses beautifully:
Loneliness is difficult to confess;
difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often
intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s
being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient,
lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness
that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social
circles.
Like
depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to
pathologisation, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically
that loneliness serves no purpose… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any
experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of
meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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