A Lonely One
“I probably am a lonely one.” — Edward Hopper
I spent my Sunday morning reading through Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, a book reflecting on the way that loneliness invades the people-filled lives of urbanites all across the world.
It has become a common experience to be completely surrounded by people while at the same time feeling so very alone — and being around others actually manages to magnify that loneliness, instead of providing a sense of connection.
The Lonely City begins with an epigraph that I found particularly appealing: Romans 12:5, “and every one members one of another.” Another translation: “Many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.” Another: “Vitally joined to one another, with each contributing to the other.” It seems fitting to begin a book on loneliness by remembering our intrinsically connected nature. The verse implies that for better or for worse, we are joined. At least we’re supposed to be.
Laing’s first focus is on Edward Hopper, the American realist who most famously painted Nighthawks. His portraits all convey a sense of urban loneliness that seems gripping in their quiet. This is true even for his most famous painting, which shows four silent figures, together but wholly separate, sitting in a picture-perfect slice of Americana. The diner, the author notes, has no exit door visible. It’s easy to imagine the glass walls that contain the subjects as an aquarium or a cage, instead of a restaurant.
I have a memory of sitting at a coffee shop that I frequented often and getting to ‘know’ the regulars and baristas, not necessarily through introductions but through the shared experience of being together in the same spot again and again.
There was a woman who always sat in the same spot every day, silently working on her laptop, quietly present in the room. One day as she left she said goodbye to a barista that she had a particular rapport with, and after she was gone another barista on bar turned to their co-worker and said a single sentence:
“Who was that?”
How is it that we can be so ‘present’ while at the same time being so alone?
The author notes that the power in Hopper’s work is capturing the beauty of loneliness, the idea that “loneliness was something worth looking at.” This is true when I look at Nighthawks, and it takes on a further level of beauty when you think of it in the context in which it was created, America circa 1941, a country newly at war. Suddenly the little things in life take on so much more value, and Laing notes in The Lonely City that it can be easy to look at the painting as “a parable about American isolationism, finding in the diner’s fragile refuge a submerged anxiety about the nation’s abrupt lurch into conflict, the imperiling of a way of life.”
Yet when Hopper was asked about his work, he had little to say about their meaning, except in a single interview late in life where he gave a particularly insightful statement: “I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene. I’m trying to paint myself.”
If you’ve found yourself pulled into an Edward Hopper painting, perhaps you’ve seen yourself painted within those brushstrokes as well. I know I have.
