I’m grateful for the pink and orange sky this morning. I’m grateful for chances to be myself. I’m grateful for getting lost. I’m grateful for finding a path out. I’m grateful for lots of pennies. I’m grateful for staying a little lost. I’m grateful to be sober today.
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I’ve been reading a great book by Olivia Laing called, “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.” It’s her account of living by herself in New York and her personal reflections on solitude, loneliness and art.1 Right off the bat, she addresses the central question, “what is loneliness?” Just to allay your fears, I’m not going to try and address all of this in just this one Daily Gratitude List!2 No, I’m going to do it in two parts—today and tomorrow!
Her first formulation of loneliness is driven, in part, by the inherent loneliness of cities:
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.
The Lonely City, p. 3
This fantastic book proceeds to trace the impact of loneliness on the lives of a number of artists, but I was really transfixed by the first chapter on Edward Hopper. When I was in college, for one reason or another, there were a lot of road trips to Chicago. My girlfriend went to Northwestern, I had always been a pretty big Cubs fan and, well, it was just a lot of fun. Not to turn this into a drunk-alogue, but my friend Fred used to accompany me for pretty-stoned tours of either the Art Institute or the Field Museum of Natural History.3
If you want a taste of what the tours of the Art Institute were like, well, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a pretty close approximation. I always loved looking at the Grant Wood paintings—the rounded 1930’s evocation of the rounded landscape of Eastern Iowa always grabbed me. The other highlight of those visits was standing in front of Nighthawks, probably the best known of Hopper’s paintings:
A lot is written about the connections, or lack thereof, between the diner patrons, but what always struck me about this painting was the perspective; it’s very solitary and observational, maybe even a little voyeuristic. The couple depicted might not be in starry-eyed love and the solitary man may be a little down on his luck, but what about the person looking in on at that scene? Positioned off to the side, out of the primary glare of the diner light, but with a clear view of the four people in the diner and the rest of the deserted street. And willing to take a good long look.
Olivia Laing describes Hopper’s work as being about “the expression of urban loneliness in visual terms.” There is currently a show at the Whitney Museum entitled“Edward Hopper’s New York” and it’s just stunning. Hopper lived in Washington Square with his wife and frequent model,Jo, for most of his career. It may be that Hopper found New York to embody modern notions of loneliness, but it is also clear that he loved the city. He wandered around, taking the trains, taking in shows and his perspectives of New York are loving but ghost-y. I love this painting, “Queensborough Bridge:”
I love the way the empty bridge rises out of the gloom over a deserted Roosevelt Island. The paintings that most reflect the paradoxical solitude one finds or sometimes can’t escape in a densely-populated city are these:
They all show solitary people in solitary settings, being observed by someone even more apart, even more disconnected than the subjects. There is an observational, I think inquisitive, nature to these paintings. There is a palpable feeling of emptiness when I look at them.
Here’s maybe something that’s different about me—I always found that feeling to be slightly exciting. The feeling when you realize you’re really alone; that you’re a little lost. That, despite an obvious lack of qualifications, you’ve been placed in command of your own life, given a ship to sail with no set course or map. I started noticing those feelings at a pretty young age. Moments when I realized I was alone started to produce this odd mix of excitement and fear, my stomach would clench in a pleasant twist, I’d feel a different kind of focus.
Looking back, I think that was me surfacing; being alone meant it was safe for the real me to peek my head out and look around.
I was a very shy kid. I’m still very shy, although roughly no one believes me when I say that. I’m not sure why I am so shy, so fearful of expressing myself in so many situations, but I am. It gets read as aloofness, disdain, superiority; it’s mostly just bafflement and fear. I often find myself in situations where I just don’t know what to do, or more often, what to say. Afraid to choose the wrong course, I often just remain quiet and see where the boat ends up.
I had libraries as babysitters quite a bit. I’d wait for my mom to pick me up at the Iowa City Public Library or, better yet, get turned loose at the massive University of Iowa Library—the one with an acre of card catalogs and stacks that seemed like a massive wilderness to me. That’s where I really felt the most deliciously alone; those solitary moments were filled with freedom and possibility and imagination. Reading for me was very observational and the more I read, the more I approached life with that same inquisitive, outside-lookin-in perspective.
The problem for me was connecting with other people. I’m going to tell you that there were not many people in my Junior High who relished the idea of spending time alone in a library like I did, and I’m pretty sure I would not have wanted to hang out with them if I could have found them. The more time I spent alone, time where the real me was out on the prowl, well, there was less to talk about with other people. We all develop outward facing storefronts, I developed the sense that how much time I spent alone, and worse, what I did when I was alone (read, go to libraries, browse used bookstores, go to movies by myself) set me further and further apart from everyone else. I was too afraid to show other people my true, authentic self, and if you can’t do that, it’s kind of tough to forge real connections.
That’s where alcohol entered the picture for me. There was almost no drinking in my family growing up. My Dad would keep a few cans of Schlitz in the refrigerator in case one of his Grad students was over and expressed a desire for a can of shitty beer that was substantially older than their dissertation. I had no frame of reference when I had that first drink, no idea what it would taste like or what it would do. When I started drinking, I suddenly felt that familiar twist of anticipation, of possibility and freedom. This was different, though. This time I wasn’t free by myself, I was free from myself.
I could be whoever I wanted to be, I wasn’t afraid to tell jokes, to be silly, to take ridiculous risks (always somewhat calculated). I was subversive, funny, sarcastic and was always a little in trouble. The world went from something I was very much apart from, something that I really mostly observed, to something that I could actively shape. I could accomplish things, persuade people, get what I wanted--and I didn’t have to take the risk of showing the real me, the one that mostly came out in the quiet situations. I just had to drink. That was a solution I could get behind, and I did.
Olivia Laing writes about the connection between loneliness and shame; the sense, when one is alone, that one is somehow shamefully different than everyone else who has managed to find companionability, contented couple-hood. I’m not sure when the feelings of shame began to intinct my experience of being alone, but it fundamentally transformed that experience, one that I had found so pleasurable, where I had found so much meaning and joy, into something I needed to run from. A lamentable situation I needed to fix.
I went from a kid who loved time alone, savored every drop of independence, couldn’t wait to deliver newspapers in the dark, to someone who needed a steady drip of Sauvignon Blanc to avoid the realization that we were very much alone, and likely to remain that way. My repeated efforts at sobriety always required returning to that now untenable place—the place of being alone, but without the medication, the magic elixir, that was necessary to tolerate that now terrible place. That’s why attempt after attempt to stop drinking failed; none of my self-determined assaults on sobriety could survive contact with myself and they all led back to exactly the same place. A stool at the end of the bar.
What changed? Well, that’s for tomorrow. I’ll give you a hint, it involved seeing how connected I always was, even when I couldn’t see anyone around me. Was it a magic trick? Maybe. See you tomorrow.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
She also wrote a fantastic book about alcoholism and writing called “The Trip to Echo Springs.”
It has been suggested that calling this a “Daily Gratitude List,” is a bit under-descriptive? Mis-descriptive?
We found the Giant Sloth skeleton on the Second Floor to be particularly transfixing and terrifying.