The Lonely City

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.

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person

I knew what I looked like. I looked like a woman in a Hopper painting. The girl in Automat, maybe, in a cloche hat and green coat, gazing into a cup of coffee, the window behind her reflecting two rows of lights, swimming into blackness. Or the one in Morning Sun, who sits on her bed, hair twisted into a messy bun, gazing through her window at the city beyond.

I’ve come to believe that he was right, that loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right to the heart of what we value and what we need.

I wanted to understand what it means to be lonely, and how it has functioned in people’s lives, to attempt to chart the complex relationship between loneliness and art.

Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.

Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

IMAGINE STANDING BY A WINDOW at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building.

was working, but I didn’t have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.

Loneliness is a very special place. It isn’t always easy to see the truth of Wilson’s statement, but over the course of my travels I’ve come to believe that he was right, that loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right to the heart of what we value and what we need. Many marvellous things have emerged from the lonely city: things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it.