Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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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.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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“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.”
–Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Lonely (New York: Picador, 2016)
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on loneliness as hunger
olivia laing the lonely city (via @morepeachyogurt) \\ rachel ingalls mrs. caliban (via @araekni) \\ yves olade dark when it gets dark: “topograph” (via @muguetdemai) \\ victoria chang obit (via @feral-ballad)
kofi
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Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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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.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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On loneliness as hunger
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing//Alive at the End of the World, Saeed Jones//Faithless, Joyce Carol Oates
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In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
- Except from David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives, as mentioned by Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp. 133.
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