The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

In The Lonely City, the author explores artists whose work and/or lives represent urban loneliness—Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanis, David Wojnarowicz—during a lonely time in her life.

The last paragraphs of the book are very moving:

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars.... But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting? About desire? ...About experiencing unhappiness? Why this need... to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turning inward from the world at large?

“In her discussion about [her sewn fiber-art piece] ‘Strange Fruit,' Zoe Leonard made a statement about this business of imperfection, about the way life is made up of endless failures of intimacy, endless errors and separations that anyway culminate only with loss. ‘At first, the sewing was a way to think about David [Wojnarowicz]. I'd think about the things I'd like to repair and all the things I'd like to put back together.... After awhile, I began thinking about loss itself.... All the friends I'd lost. All the mistakes I've made. The inevitability of a scarred life.... The attempt to sew it back together. This mending... provided something for me. Maybe just time or the rhythm of sewing. I haven't been able to change anything in the past,... but I've been able to experience my love and loss in a measured and continuous way. To remember.'

“There are so many things that art can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life. It can't mend arguments between friends.... All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions.... It does have a capacity to create intimacy. It does have a way of healing wounds. And better yet, of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing, and not all scars are ugly. If I sound adamant, it's because I'm speaking from personal experience.... The way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing, by way of this contact, the fact that loneliness, longing does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities. And there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions, too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect.... 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... in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone.... 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 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.”