Can we cope with solitary urban life?
Loneliness is an itch but what device will ever scratch it fully away?
It helps to regard it as a deeply interesting condition that we’ll all encounter repeatedly: you’re always alone with a new baby but not really; lonely-in-acrowd is why people drink at parties; lonely in a city; in a marriage; at university; the dreading of Sundays.
Loneliness is not a function of solitude, said David Foster Wallace, who spent far too much time alone, writing. The results were marvellous for us but look what happened to him. And no, being married and having a dog didn’t help.
Loneliness is a problem felt at one’s core. Are people less connected and lonelier now than before? It may be so.
The British scholar Olivia Laing has written on art and landscape, art and alcoholism and now American art produced by those who never really left the confines of their own head, in an effort to deeply analyze what being alone does to people. (Full disclosure: I contributed to Laing’s crowdfunded research library.)
Her brilliant new book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, studies, among others, that grimmest of painters, Edward Hopper, awkward tainted Andy Warhol, the manifesto-ist Valerie Solanas who shot Warhol, and the lifelong solitary Chicago janitor Henry Darger, who left a massive fascinating art haul.
They were arguably detestable humans, but who wouldn’t be after such dark childhoods? These were not contented people, they basically spent their lives writhing. Laing points out what I had never noticed: the diner filled with loners in Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks, has no door. How did the nighthawks enter? Trapped in the zoo of the lonely, they can’t leave.
I’m worried that Laing’s book will be wrongly categorized as being about single women, which is currently one of those desert islands created by publishers — this year’s version of the memoir on depression, the brain or PTSD — little Maldives that disappear as oceans rise and public attention moves on. She is writing about human loneliness. She studies the way men and women live now, mostly in cities and with even less emotional connection because of the falsity of online life.
Consider the manic people who email, comment and post on social media. I had thought them angry but perhaps it was desperation. Loneliness triggers a “hypervigilance for social threat . . . in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn,” writes Laing.
Is there anything sadder than people screaming to be noticed yet choosing an anonymity that makes connection impossible? Maybe Trump voters attend his rallies to meet other damaged people? Hey, it’s a strategy.
Extreme isolation is beyond my remit: take the Beijing woman who was trapped in a shut-down elevator and was found a month later. I will also not discuss the vicious Harlow experiments on infant monkeys who were taken from their mothers and still desperately hugged wire simulacra; they needed cuddles. Humans need other humans. When they don’t find them, the screen, the black mirror, become the wire monkey mother. Facebook makes them feel lonelier. Twitter is out to kill. Empathy dies.
Laing describes extreme ravaged 1970s New York scenes of public sexual depravity before the city was Disneyfied and made an enclave of the rich. The artist David Wojnarowicz described seeing, through a peephole, a man having sex with a prostitute with unhealed knife wounds all over her belly. Wojnarowicz, a damaged person himself, was horrified that the man “couldn’t conceive of pain attached to the body” he was entering.
Who else but Laing could take us from a little light anomie to bleak afternoons to bad parties to the ultimate human loneliness, which is the failure of empathy. Art, especially by the artists Laing studies, can express loneliness as nothing else can.
For instance, she asks, are we not living in the movie Blade Runner, wondering who the Replicants are, and if in fact they might be us, living online with less and less human feeling?
Laing says emotions can be gentrified, just as cities can, “a homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect” in which harsh feelings like loneliness and rage are seen as things that can be fixed rather than “a response to structural injustice.”
In other words, if you feel lonely there may be a cultural reason for that, and it may not reside within you. It may have been imposed on you by economic and social change, and we should work on that instead.
hmallick@thestar.ca