The best right now|In the book Lonely City, Olivia Laing describes the experience of being an outsider in New York through art and her own life.
Loneliness experience is not the same as being alone. I’ve been at my loneliest in the midst of people: on the city streets, in apartment buildings, in cafes.
Many artists have also experienced this. The feeling of being an outsider in a pulsating city cuts through, among other things, visual artists like by Edward Hopper or Andy Warhol in works. We also travel alone by JD Salinger, Haruki Murakami and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the cities of the novels.
The loneliness experienced in the city also easily brings to mind domestic literature. Mika Waltarin A grand illusion, by Henry Parland Sulfur, Juhani Ahon Alone. Dramatic young adults walking the streets of an excitingly modernizing Helsinki a hundred years ago.
All men, these visual artists and writers.
For women aimlessly wandering the streets is traditionally charged with physical fear, not with the thrill of a lone hero or existential questions.
Even to the extent that in literature, a woman’s loneliness is mainly located indoors. There are plenty of suffocating rooms, starting with the American one by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from a classic novel Yellow wallpaper (1892), in which a husband locks his wife, suffering from postpartum depression, in the nursery. In Finnish literature, lonely women have been prisoners of their homes Ahon From Mrs. Papin Maria Jotunin To the swaying house.
The women in Edward Hopper’s paintings also stay mostly in an apartment, in a gallery or in a cafe, experiencing outsideness while being closed inside.
Fine City of the Lonely in the essays Olivia Laing walks the streets of New York, mapping the outside world through artists and his own life. He has moved to the city in search of love all the way from Britain, only to find himself left alone. Laing finds solace in delving into the experience of loneliness in art, just like Hopper and Warhol by David Wojnarowitcz and of Henry Darger at work.
Fortunately, Laing can wander around the city looking for himself, relatively safe regardless of his gender.
Even in today’s world, loneliness is a difficult feeling, but I’d rather walk the streets thinking about my place in the world than fearing rape.
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You can’t get rid of being human.
In everything in its scaryness, loneliness is also an inseparable part of being human. However, when treading the streets, it is good to distinguish what outsiderness is one’s own experience and what is structural: exclusion due to skin color, gender or sexuality.
You can fight against the latter. However, you can’t get rid of being human.
While walking the streets of New York, Laing sees the experiences and fates of the artists who wandered there. He can also name the reasons behind them: the persecution of gay men in 1980s New York, poverty, a broken home.
Through art, Laing dives into loneliness and finds his kind. Maybe even himself.
Olivia Laing: Lonely City — An exploration into the art of solitude (Lonely City). Finnish Sirje Niitepõld. Work. 335 pp.
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