Olivia Laing Quotes

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.

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. 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.

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 as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?

Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - 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, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.

Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

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, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.

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 world of objects, 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.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn't anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.

This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.

Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.

He's really sweet, actually." "I don't think we're talking about the same Sed. Sedric Lionheart. Tall guy. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes. Short black hair. Body befitting a Greek god. Sings. La la la la.

What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour? Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space.

The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms.

Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them.

We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.

David was a loner. Although he knew many people, he preferred to relate to them one-to-one. Everyone knew a slightly different David.

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.

If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing.

You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You're selfish and rigid and absorbed, you're like an infant.

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself.

Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired.

Taking a photograph is an act of possession, a way of making something visible while simultaneously freezing it in place, locking it in time.

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, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. 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.

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.

No podías resumirnos a Olivia y a mí en nostalgia. El día que la conocí bajo ese árbol, es como si respirara parte de ella en mis pulmones. Seguimos volviendo el uno al otro. La distancia entre nuestros cuerpos creció con los años al tratar de vivir separados. Pero esa parte de ella agarró raíces y creció. Y más allá de la distancia o circunstancias, Olivia es algo que crece dentro de mí.

A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads,

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal.

They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them.

Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

Había tenido tiempo de sobra para reflexionar y comprender que es más fácil odiar que amar, es más sencillo esconder la cabeza bajo al almohada que lidiar con los problemas y es más cómodo quejarse que ponerse en la piel del otro.

It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be.

E non ditemi che tanto non cambia niente, perché c'è sempre qualcuno che cambia il mondo a nostra insaputa e anche voi, se solo voleste, potreste farlo.

― Ya sabes lo que dicen. La ausencia permite que el corazón se vuelva más cariñoso. ― Si mi corazón se vuelve más cariñoso, va a saltar de mi pecho y a meterse en el tuyo.

I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else.

Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, 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, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. I

What this means is that the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuation itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge. This is why I was suddenly so hyper-alert to criticism, and why I felt so perpetually exposed hunching in on myself even as I walked anonymously through the streets, my flip-flops slapping on the ground.

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.

Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.

The stopped time of a painting, say, or the drawn-out minutes and compressed years of a novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible.

Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motional like a marble. You couldn't rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later.

Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: ‘Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness.

Así se reanudó una amistad prohibida que por lo menos una vez se pareció al amor. Hablaban hasta el amanecer, sin ilusiones ni despecho, como un viejo matrimonio condenado a la rutina. Creían ser felices, y tal vez lo eran, hasta que uno de los dos decía una palabra de más, o daba un paso de menos, y la noche se pudría en un pleito de vándalos que desmoralizaba a los mastines. Todo volvía entonces al principio, y Dulce Olivia desaparecía de la casa por largo tiempo.

If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant's wail: I don't want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I'm lonely. I'm scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held.

Scrivendo mi innamoro delle parole e mi convinco di tutto.

«L'infelicità» sussurrava la nonna come a svelarmi uno dei suoi segreti «è non avere abbastanza desideri.»

Si quieres salvarte de esta bestia, como tu la llamas, tendrás que comértela entera.

No sirve de nada ganar si la victoria no es limpia

We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark.

The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. I don't suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.

[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.

Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: a demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing.

People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies.

Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

Voy a lograr que tu vida a mi lado sea la película más hermosa de todas

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.

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intensity of serpents'—serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cru-zana, and enchiladas.

What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent upon the oppression or exclusion of other people.

En sus brazos, se sentía pequeña aunque no lo era. Le costaba creer que Patrick se sintiese tan protegido en sus brazos, como le ocurría a ella.—¿Qué sientes? —preguntó abrazándolo con más fuerza.—Que me haces falta y aquí estás. Eso siento —susurró apoyando la barbilla en su cabeza.

A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.

I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder, and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.

Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one's corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?

What did people know, what were they ignorant of? This was the problem with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a personal or global frame.

He llegado a la conclusión de que no hay reglas fijas en la vida. Haz lo que tengas que hacer para sobrevivir. Si eso significa huir del amor de tu vida para preservar tu salud mental, hazlo. Si eso significa romper el corazón de alguien para no romper el tuyo; hazlo. La vida es complicada, demasiado para que haya absolutos. Estamos todos tan rotos. Escoge una persona, sacúdelos y escucharás el ruido de sus pedazos rotos. Piezas que nuestros padres rompieron, o nuestras madres o nuestros amigos, desconocidos, o nuestros amores. Olivia ha dejado de sonar tanto como solía hacerlo. El amor es una herramienta dada por Dios, me dice. Atornilla las cosas en el lugar que están sueltas, y realizas limpieza de todas las piezas rotas que no necesitas más.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held. It was the sensation of need that frightened me the most, as if I’d lifted the lid on an unappeasable abyss. I stopped eating very much and my hair fell out and lay noticeably on the wooden floor, adding to my disquiet.

Ed è quel momento, irripetibile, quando tutto è possibile e l'altro è una lavagna vuota tutta da scrivere e dietro questi occhi potrebbe esserci scritta qualsiasi trama. Intatta come un campo dove è scesa la neve. Lasciati andare, Olivia. Ma non lasciarlo andare.

A useful analogy for what [Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick] calls 'reparative reading' is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn't mean being naïve or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.

Fiction can do that: can make a space for reflecting, for generating novel ways of responding and reacting to lies and guns and walls alike. The mere act of cracking open a book, Smith thinks, is creative in itself, capable of inculcating kindness and agility in the reader. ‘Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised” - Olivia Laing, Funny Weather

In her diary of 1929, Virginia Woolf described a sense of inner loneliness that she thought might be illuminating to analyse, adding: ‘If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.’ Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.

—Significa que no puedo pensar en otra cosa más que en estar a tu lado. —¿Para cuidarme? Stella sonrió incrédula. —No —le besó en los labios—. Para que tú me cuides. —¿Semanas... o meses? —tanteó. Ella le tomó la cabeza con ambas manos y acercó los labios a su oído. —Mil años o más. Te quiero, Phillip. —Ya era hora —gruñó abrazándola con fuerza—. He llegado a pensar que luchaba yo solo en esta guerra.

The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.

To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.

—Pues no, y he tomado una decisión. No voy a poder vivir con vosotros si os dedicáis a meteros manos. Puaj, qué asco. Quita, quita. —Pero ¿qué dices? —He decidido que ahora, yo, de forma voluntaria, me voy a un internado de ésos. Con tal de no veros más... Dicho lo cual salió por la puerta y la cerró tras ella. —Al final me da la razón —arguyó Thomas, contento.

It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it the more prevalent it was. People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn’t have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral. All the same, there is art that gestures towards repair; that, like Wojnarowicz’s stitched loaf of bread, traverses the fragile space between separation and connection.

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.

Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Though it wasn't by any means a comfortable experience, I began to wonder if Woolf wasn't right, if there wasn't more to the experience than meets the eye -- if, in fact, it didn't drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.

I'd been lonely before, but never like this. Loneliness had waxed in childhood, and waned in the more social years that followed. I'd lived by myself since my mid-twenties, often in relationships but sometimes not. Mostly I liked the solitude, or, when I didn't, felt fairly certain I'd sooner or later drift into another liaison, another love. The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed.

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.

I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous.

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”... Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn't anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhleming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.

What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour?Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotise myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings. At the same time I wanted to wake up, to be politically and socially engaged. And then again I wanted to declare my presence, to list my interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there, thinking with my fingers, even if I’d almost lost the art of speech. I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.

All these people talk about [Vivian Maier'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 neither 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.

—Buenos días. ¿Interrumpo algo? —saludó la abogada. —Joder... —murmuró entre dientes Thomas—. No me lo puedo creer. —¿Has venido sola? —preguntó Olivia, saludándola con dos besos. —No, Max está abajo renegando y aparcando. —Oh, ¿de verdad? ¿Y va a subir? Lo digo porque me encantaría conocerlo y que me firmara un autógrafo y que... —Creo que alguien se está poniendo celoso... —Pongámonos a trabajar —dijo el novio celoso. —No te pongas así, pichurri —canturreó Olivia para molestarlo. —Empecemos, por favor —insistió Thomas señalando los asientos.

The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

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. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.

Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others. [...] The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly the contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge.

«Seremos», repitió Laura en silencio. Kenneth formaba parte del Taormina, jamás sería feliz lejos de allí, ni ella lejos de él. Ese era su sitio y el de ella también. Inspiró profundamente y alzó la barbilla para armarse de valor. —Al diablo las empresas serias, el miedo al futuro y las palabras que no se pueden pronunciar. ¡Cásate conmigo! Kenneth no movió ni un músculo. Segundos después giró para quedar cara a cara, con un ademán tan elegante que a Laura se le agitó la respiración. —Esa frase es mía —dijo con calma. Ella lo miraba desconcertada—. Me refiero a la última, eso me corresponde preguntarlo a mí. La voluminosa presencia del persistente cabecilla se aproximó con paso enérgico. —Oiga, el alcalde ¿va a salir o no? —preguntó con los brazos en jarras. —¿Es que no se puede tener ni un minuto de intimidad? —se revolvió Kenneth indignado—. Mi chica me está pidiendo que me case con ella.

—Por cierto, antes de que se me olvide. —Él rompió el silencio—. Creo que debería decírtelo, es algo que no puedo ocultar y que acabarás por enterarte. Ella se inquietó, por la forma en que lo decía no podía presagiar nada bueno. Lo miró en silencio, esperando que, fuera lo que fuese, no cambiara las cosas. Pero él parecía más ocupado en excitarla y no podía concentrarse si estaba pensando en lo que tenía que decir. Pero es que sus manos... sus manos estaban por todas partes, presionando un pezón, acariciando sus labios vaginales... Por no hablar de su boca, que la besaba en el cuello, en el hombro... Oh, qué delicia. Pero esa inquietud hacía que no pudiera disfrutar al cien por cien. Colocó la mano sobre la de él para detenerlo. —¿Qué eso tan importante que tienes que decirme? —Bah, nada, poca cosa. —Él intentó de nuevo meter la mano entre sus piernas. —¡Habla! —Pues nada, que te quiero —dijo él con ese tono pedante, como si dijera la hora. Ella se quedó inmóvil al escucharlo. ¿Cómo podía ser tan retorcido? Aunque... era «su retorcido» y lo quería por eso; así que sonrió, le dio acceso y buscó una réplica contundente. —Sólo tú puedes decir algo importante de forma tan enrevesada —le respondió alegre.

―Incluso tus pies son sexys -murmuró ella. ―¿Esa es tu parte preferida de mí? - preguntó él en voz baja tan cerca de su oído que la piel se le puso de gallina en el cuello. ―Deberías saber cuál es mi parte preferida de ti. ―¿La llamas La Bestia? Ella sonrió. Se imaginó que eso era lo que él pensaba. ―No, pero La Bestia está en el Top Diez. ―El Top Diez, ¿eh? -Brian le besó el borde la oreja. Un escalofrió le recorrió la columna. ―¿Son mis labios? Ella sacudió la cabeza. ―No, pero también están en el Top Diez. Con la lengua le rozó el punto pulsante bajo su oreja. ―¿La lengua? ―No. Mi Top Diez parece muy lleno. Él se echó a reír y la abrazó. ―Es obvio que son mis manos. -Brian las sostuvo frente a ella y flexionó los dedos. ―Equivocado de nuevo. Sin embargo es una buena suposición. ―De acuerdo, me rindo -dijo él. Myrna se dio vuelta para mirarlo. ―Es tu cerebro. Él cubrió la sorpresa con una sonrisa. ―Bueno, tengo que admitir que esa era la última parte que pensé que dirías. ―Controla todas tus otras partes. Es el responsable de tu increíble talento, tanto para la guitarra como en la cama.‖ Brian sonrió. Ella nunca descubriría porque necesitaba que lo completara cuando tenía groupies gritando por su piedad. ―Te hace decir cosas que me hacen reír y pensar. Te da esa dulce y romántica racha que trato de resistir. Tu personalidad, tu talento, tu corazón y tu alma. Lo que te hace ser tú. Todo eso está en tu asombrosa mente. No me malinterpretes. El cuerpo que tienes también es fabuloso. ―Creo que me estoy sonrojando.