The Lonely City blends together personal narrative, art criticism, and psychology to explore the pervasiveness of loneliness and the ways that art can help both the artist and the audience to ameliorate it.
I was stunned and moved by Laing's empathic description of loneliness in the first full chapter, titled "Walls of Glass." I was particularly struck by the moment when Laing dissolved into tears when she couldn't close the blinds at her sublet apartment:
It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop's glare.
I think of loneliness as 'the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy," but Laing expands the concept by noting that lonely people are hyper-attentive to social threats and that a lack of understanding from others is just as causative as a lack of feeling.
Her descriptions of her various New York apartments are vivid and evocative. She makes the lurid scenes in 1970s Times Square and the docks seem life-affirming if not wholesome.
Laing's main thesis is that loneliness drives the creation of art, and that art can help alleviate loneliness in the audience. During the middle section of the book, she shades into discussing full-blown outsider status, and her advocacy for marginalized communities becomes more typical. She returns to her subject at the end, arguing that art invests objects with feeling and noticing:
... a sense of the potential beauty in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need... What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? ... 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment