The Lonely City

Sometimes you are drawn to a book, just by knowing its title. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, by Olivia Laing, proved to be one such. Drawn to the book because of what I was feeling- living among the people, but still alone in a city. A city, beautiful in itself, blessed by a long coast, pristine beaches, green mountains, and pleasant monsoon weather. Yet, the people here are totally unknown to me, their language not entirely unknown but not entirely known either. I resonate with the writer's own feelings of living alone in a city like New York. I have lived in Bombay for six months, and I have felt terribly alone sometimes, despite having some familiar faces to go to. What is it with cities and loneliness? Despite having access to all the modern facilities, public transport, cafes, and restaurants; somehow, I still felt lonely in Bombay, and still feel lonely, here in Vizag. I go to office on Sundays, not to work, but just so that I don't get bored sitting alone at this place I'm living in currently.

Olivia Laing, coping with a personal loss -the details of which she has not mentioned - moves to New York, The Lonely City is her memoir of those couple of years in the city, living alone in her apartment, reading alone, writing alone. She narrates stories of various artists like Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and others, trying to find the same loneliness in their works of art. She contemplates:

"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?
 
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."

Laing, towards the end, writes, and I feel as if she were addressing this to me:

"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, 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, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
 
I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. 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 world of objects, 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."

Reading through the book, stories of artists, their struggle with loneliness, in a strange way comforted me. That I am not alone in this endeavour. And that feeling, in itself, is so strange. I have often wondered whether loneliness is a vicious state to get into. It becomes comfortable, and we start isolating ourselves, and the more lonely we become. The more it starts becoming comfortable, the more we start isolating ourselves and the lonelier we become. How does technology help? It is a distraction, an illusion, that we are not lonely. Facebook, WhatsApp, all make us feel that we are a part of the world. But what if we face rejection there as well? Not a single personal message on WhatsApp for two days, no comment, no tag on Facebook- and it feels as if the world is forgetting us. Andy Warhol's obsession with machine, with television, was a result of his own loneliness. Is there a cure for loneliness? Or does one just accept it, live with it, the way it is? In Bombay, I had friends to temporarily cure my loneliness; here I have nothing but books, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

The question of dealing with loneliness remains. Loneliness can, in the long term, lead to death. But in the short term, can lead us to do some good as well, I guess. Some people paint. Some people write. I compose poems.

Solitude

I waited for it,

Through the humid afternoon,

And the salty sea breeze,

Rushing through my hair.

And when it did,

It didn't rain, but poured.

The pouring stopped,

And I ventured out,

For a solitary walk,

In the drizzle.

Drinking tea,

Contemplating life,

Reminiscing friendships.

Slowly, sipping the tea,

Watching the drizzle.

Slowly, the glass emptied,

And the drizzle stopped.

All that remained was,

Me, and my loneliness.