Courtesy of striking French air traffic controllers, I had a longer journey back from Toulouse than I’d expected today, and managed to read the whole of Olivia Laing’s thought-provoking book 
[amazon_image id=”1782111239″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone[/amazon_image]
It wasn’t what I’d expected from the reviews, which made it seem like a kind of travelogue about her having some time alone in New York and reflecting on modern urban life; I’m a sucker for books about sitting in foreign cafes feeling a sense of anomie while writing in one’s notebook. Instead,
with a soupcon of Patti Smith’s
. Through her research into the work and lives of four artists who engaged with and battled with loneliness, but also with poverty, rejection, AIDS, Laing actually gives us a profound discussion of society’s inability to tolerate difference.
She also reflects on the role of our use of digital contact through social media and always being online – using it as a shield against human contact and at the same time a means of human contact. Laing notes the trajectory of Sherry Turkle’s assessment of digital tech through her trilogy,
(1995) and the far more pessimistic
(2011).
Andy Warhol, one of the artists discussed by Laing, predates Twitter and Facebook. What would he have done with them, I wonder?
