A lovely and lyrical little book. A testament to all the myriad ways one can feel sadness and longing — whether in silence (Hopper) or sexual longing and political anger (Wojnorowicz) or escaping the vicissitudes of body and others (Warhol) or just the bare fact of having no one in your life (Darger). I like the fact that she depicts more than she theorizes. Loneliness comes from fundamental needs, its provenance is not debated. But its experience is hard to articulate. I think the best way to understand it is to feel it yourself, and in that regard she succeeds very well. She takes her own loneliness and projects it to and embodies it with the art of the people she writes about.
It is a curiously circumscribed book, however. She writes about men in the city---whither women? (There is a brief section on Garbo, but it’s just a sketch.) Whither the loneliness of the country? I understand that she channels her own loneliness through these artists, but it’s telling to see the uniformity of these artists. Is loneliness a fundamentally male and urban trait? Male, in that men have in the main less social support than women? Urban, in that having no connection with the mass of people around you in the city engenders paroxysms of grief, of feeling the distinct lack of what could be right in front of you?
I think it’s a deliberate demarcation, in both of those counts. Maybe female loneliness (despite the author, since she feels herself a ‘gay boy’) is distinct from male loneliness, a subject of another book entirely. (I’m thinking of Nico and Lana Del Rey.) And rural loneliness is certainly distinct from urban loneliness, one where you’re alone not because there are no people. I think it’s a more cosmic loneliness, one that makes one contemplate nature (which is all around you) rather than human transactions.