"The Lonely City by Olivia Laing" click to see the review

When I wrote a review for the book, "The Lonely City by Olivia Laing", I found myself going back and thinking about the following statement taken from the first paragraph of the book that comments on being alone in your room in a big city looking out of the windows and seeing people in those windows.

“Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and from, attending to business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.
You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure."

This thought is presented as fact, but it also suggests how the author sees loneliness. If you are socially minded you will be quicker to see your own isolation.

Some like solitude, and it may take a lot more than not being able to reach all the people you see to cause loneliness. Perhaps for them it is in not being able to find their purpose?

Loneliness may be common, but the causes, and how it feels, are not common in how you explain it.

Brent M. Jones

Brent writes with quiet confidence and curiosity, exploring communication, reinvention, and what truly matters. His reflections invite readers to slow down, reconsider their stories, and reconnect with the values that guide them. Through books, essays, and his What Matters Substack Articles and Notes, he offers writing that doesn’t shout—but still speaks clearly.