Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
by Olivia Laing
First Posted July 2016
I used to take the 6 train almost every day, but by the time I read Lonely City I had moved to Gowanus and so taking a picture of that beaver frieze was slow in coming. I still remember the feeling of knowing it was in there, and simply not having a chance to photograph it. Time moves differently in NYC commute mode. Even near the start of six years of away, I still miss NYC with my whole heart.
New York City is big, but Manhattan is little. Reading The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, which is set mostly in Manhattan, doesn’t require living here, but it adds something irreplaceable:
I began frequenting the Wojnarowicz archive at Fales Library, which is housed inside the big Bobst Library at New York University, right opposite Hopper’s old studio in Washington Square. It was just the right distance for a walk and I took a different route each day, crisscrossing the East Village, sometimes dawdling past the little hidden cemetery on East 2nd and sometimes lingering to read the posters outside La Mama and Joe’s Pub.
Did you know there is a little hidden cemetery in the East Village? It is open to the public only a few times a year. Luck alone brought me through the opened gate once, to uncover benches and old marble statuary. It was pretty, but the knowledge that I cannot return is the facet that keeps the memory alive in my mind.
Joe’s Pub, which is about 40 feet north of my office, used to be the old Astor Library. There is a secret tunnel from the Astor Place subway stop to Joe’s, though I believe it is defunct and/or sealed. There are doors down there that don’t lead to the street but only into the K-Mart [edit from 2024- Which is now a Wegman’s]. Useful, I suppose, if you don’t want anyone to see you shopping at K-mart. Anyone other than your fellow local-6-train riders, I suppose; the woes of the Upper East Side pretender. Decorative crests adorned with beavers are down there, I think, unless I am making that up.
photo added on8.5.16— I am not making it up.
Only a scant few blocks away you’ll find the Bobst Library, which I enter exclusively for the restroom when in Washington Square Park. The library has beautiful flooring; when you’re at the top of the stacks looking down, the tiles create a very particular pattern, an illusion of—or perhaps allusion to—sharp, jagged rocks. Unverifiedly, this is designed to cause overstressed and finals-burdened NYU students to pause, to really think about how painful it would be to fling themselves into nonexistence. A golden shroud, evocative of the Matrix’ digital rain, is a ghoulish addition from five or so years ago, a physical impediment to the psyop dissuasion. Simply by its creation it undercuts the power of the “jagged rock” myth. Or at least makes one look askance when someone touts its effectiveness.
All of these thoughts flood in, crashing and swirling against each other in an instantaneous flurry, when reading the above excerpt. A single paragraph of The Lonely City stretches out for ages in an eyeblink—if you live in NYC. If you walk the author’s described route near daily. If not, I cannot say with what force the book will strike your mind and your memory. But fret not, as the text will still speak to you:
All these people talk about [Vivian Maier, photographer and nanny]’s hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn’t help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don’t know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else’s house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it’s worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all.
The author speaks literally to you, the person reading the book. It is startling to have her stop her first-person account—the now standard casual-modern-non-fiction talk-text—and turn to the reader. She directly asks you a rhetorical question while calling you “you,” drawing attention to your own existence. She knows you’re there, knows she exists as a brief voice in your head, her own existence entirely out of her control. And then this sublime moment of flux is over as the tale moves on like it was nothing at all to upend the tacit conventions upon which the written word stands. She makes a salient socioeconomic point to facilitate a mental return back to nonfictionland; the reader can forget that they were a “you” that the author wrote something to and go back to being "the reader."
That momentary “you” is not the plural, nonspecific, royal “you” that refers vaguely to all persons with sentience, but you-you, that person holding her pages in your hands, words in your eyes, thoughts in your mind. You, that walks or drives through your own city, surrounded by friends or by yourself, singular and alone because you are thinking thoughts that only you can think in that particular way. If that means you’re lonely, it’s because you—and I mean “you” as in “those people that feel lonely”—think there’s a way to connect to someone or something in a way that you haven’t yet experienced. This desire for more—this desire for difference—might lead you to some interesting places, or frightening circumstances, or even to lead to writing something excellent:
During the false spring of desire, the man and I had cooked up a hare-brained plan in which I would leave England and join him permanently in New York. When he changed his mind, very suddenly, expressing increasingly grave reservations into a series of hotel phones, I found myself adrift, stunned by the swift arrival and even swifter departure of everything I thought I lacked.
But if you’re lonely, if you think there’s something that you lack, then you’re right. You’ll make it so. Loneliness isn’t a condition of reality but a closure of heart and mind. The person you need to befriend isn’t a thousand miles away or one of the millions of souls that share your city. That thing you fear you might be missing isn’t to be found in within physical or even emotional connection with someone else. If you’re lonely, it’s because you haven’t befriended the nearest heart. New York may be big, and Manhattan may be little, but no matter where you travel within the whole wide world, you will never be alone if you are happy to be with yourself.
Though it can be pleasant to spend time lost within a book, or swept away by words lovely enough to connect you intimately to another, The Lonely City is a story that won't allow you to completely pull away from yourself. Learning how to stay within yourself is the only true remedy to loneliness.