The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 May 2020
by Olivia Laing
In our culture, loneliness is a source of shame. We see it as an illness, to be treated with drugs sold in soft-focus ads on mid-day television. We see it as something to be shunned. Lonely people are awkward, yearning for contact. We recoil from the clinging grasp of the lonely. We are afraid of the emotional commitment necessary to break a person's cycle of loneliness. As a rule, we tend to enjoy solitude. It gives us control over our time and energy. In a compressed culture such as ours, that kind of control is valuable, it keeps our own loneliness and depression at bay. But loneliness is an essential element, among the many, that makes us human. We dread loneliness, but find that there are valuable lessons to be learned in our lonely moments. Half of all songs are about loneliness. A good deal of all art is about isolation and loneliness. In our current era of social isolation, the enforced solitude of a viral pandemic, it would seem a key moment to reflect upon loneliness amongst many, living in a city and yet being lonely. In that, we have this remarkable book, first published in 2016, and bringing us an insightful look at loneliness, art, isolation, the need for intimacy of mind and body.
Olivia Laing is a British author who found herself alone in New York City after pursuing a romantic attachment, a person who ended up just not being all that into her. From this, she ended up alone in a city of many, living in a string of sublets and SROs. In the event, it is through art and artists that she explores the notion of being alone among so many. Edward Hopper is famous for his lonely seeming artworks, but even lonelier may have been his wife, Jo, whose own art and aspirations Edward suppressed, and were disdained by the collectors at the Whitney. Andy Warhol is famous as much for being famous as for his ground-breaking pop-art. But there is a yearning and a witdrawal in his character. Others, less famous but whose stories are even more enthralling, David Wojnarowicz, Klaus Nomi, Henry Darger, and the many artists with whom they were all associated. Their stories of emotional struggle, isolation, the drive to create, illness, loss and death, all sounds grim, but Laing's devotion to compassion, a call to intimacy and fellow human feeling, is ultimately uplifting.
Laing anchors her book in her own New York journey, less about art than about personal discovery of a place and those who inhabited it and created there. The book is about the essential vitality of loneliness, in spite of solitude (a different thing, after all), isolation and yearning of the kind unique to cities. And it is about identity, how each of us is alone in ourselves. Its chapter about internet entrepeneur Josh Harris, a man who experimented with the dissolution of human identity, is troubling, but again vital to our times as our loneliness is mediated through our technology. (How many screens do you interact with each day? Compare that to how many unstructured conversations you have with people face to face.) Laing's insights and the stories she relates are disturbing, a kind of undermining of our sense of our place in the world. But, again, she turns back to the humane, and the ways in which we can disconnect with the ether and reconnect with an essential reality. Not that many people are really interested in that, these days, but perhaps, one day (and soon) we will come around to remembering what it is like to have intimate connections with people themselves, rather than their avatars.
Laing's idiosyncratic look at loneliness, life in the big city, and art in the face of tragedy and isolation, is a compelling read. Well worth the time spent (alone?) in reading it and connecting with its author and her subjects.
See also: [Edward Hopper by Gail Levin] [I Bought Andy Warhol by Richard Polsky] [Just Kids by Patti Smith]