How lonely is it to live in a city surrounded by a million people?

Loneliness is a place where people come and go, and it is a city in itself.

Whether living in new york, Paris, Tokyo, or the inescapable Beishangguang, we can always feel lonely in a vibrant and crowded city.

A person walks through a noisy intersection, a person wears headphones and squeezes into the commuter subway, and a person wakes up in a small room and silently looks at the white morning light outside the window? Even in a lively party, you will feel cold in the crowd for an instant.

Olivia Lane, an acclaimed British non-fiction writer, said in Lonely City: No matter where you are, you may feel lonely, but living in a city surrounded by millions of people will give birth to a different kind of loneliness.

Olivia lane

Olivia's writing Lonely City stems from her failed love experience: she crossed the ocean for a promise and came to new york to meet her "true love", but she was mercilessly abandoned.

Olivia, who lost her love, wandered alone in the labyrinth of new york, shuttling between buildings made of concrete, granite and glass.

Everything is strange and there are no relatives or friends. She often lives in an old sublet apartment, frequently refreshes Twitter and browses endless network information. With a slight accent difference, the orders in the cafe are labeled as "strangers", and the unspeakable loneliness keeps coming.

Does that sound familiar? I believe many people have had similar experiences and feelings, running for love and dreams, but it backfired and fell into a lonely situation.

Lonely city

Olivia began to deeply understand the taste of loneliness and pursue the essence of loneliness: what does loneliness mean?

How can we live without being closely entangled with another person? If we can't talk easily, how can we get in touch with others? How to get rid of loneliness when sexual orientation is not recognized or has never been beautiful? Can technology bring us closer? Or imprison us behind a screen?

Olivia turned her attention to many artists who once lived in New York-edward hopper, andy warhol, Henry Dago, david warner Lovic, and famous photographers, film directors and singers including Nan Goldin, Hitchcock, Klaus Nomi and Billie Holiday.

These art masters have also fallen into loneliness and pain and experienced unspeakable spiritual burning, but they all try to express the theme of "loneliness" in their own way and establish contact with others through creation. Behind those well-known works of art and images related to loneliness are the fruits of their courage to face loneliness.

As Olivia said, what is shaped in loneliness can often be used to save loneliness.

Through the creation of Lonely City, Olivia also found a way to redeem herself: trying to find out what loneliness is, sharing his thoughts on loneliness with us, exploring the unique loneliness of the city, digging deep into the artist's background and creating stories, and trying to describe the complex relationship between loneliness and art to us.

The following is a trial reading of the text of "Lonely City", which is excerpted from the article "Unreal Country". Thanks for the unauthorized release:

Renting a house and living in other people's property is an interesting behavior. Some people once built their homes here, but now they have left. My bed is on the platform. When I go up, I have to climb three very steep steps. When I come down, I have to go backwards like a sailor. At the end of the room, there is a window enclosed with wooden boards, which leads to a ventilation shaft. Music and dialogue will come through the window from time to time and linger in my ears for a long time. I'm like the kind of silly tenant described by Luke Santer in "Underlife" (this book is the magical narrative of old new york). Over the years, people have come and gone in these rooms, leaving behind cans of lipstick and hand cream. The cupboard in the kitchen is full of half-eaten granola and yoga tea bags. No one has watered the plants or wiped the dust off the shelves for months.

I hardly meet anyone in the building during the day, but at night, I hear the sound of a door being opened and closed, and people pass only one or two meters away from my bed. The man who lives next door is a CD player. Sometimes waves of bass will rush in from the wall day and night, and the noise will vibrate in my chest. At two or three o'clock in the morning, the steam steamed the pipeline and made a tinkling sound. Sometimes, just before dawn, I will be awakened by the siren of the fire truck. They are about to start from the fire station on East Second Street. This fire station lost six members in the "9. 1 1 incident".

It feels like everything can be penetrated and silted up, just like an unlocked room or a cave that will be flooded by seawater regularly. I slept very lightly, often got up to check my email, and then lay aimlessly on the sofa, watching the sky above the fire escape turn from dark to dark blue, and the Bank of JPMorgan Chase was in front of me. In the past, several families all had the appearance of a psychic. On a sunny afternoon, she would knock on the window and call me in, no matter how firmly I shook my head. No bad news, no inspiration for the future, thank you. I don't want to know if I will meet anyone or what awaits me in the future.

Due to illness or bereavement, mental illness or the unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, people will eventually disappear into the city, disappear from sight and retreat into their apartments, because they don't know how to forcibly embed themselves into this world, and it is becoming easier and easier to witness all this. I have tasted a little, but what if I have to live like this all my life and occupy a blind spot in other people's lives and their noisy intimate relationships?

If anyone works under such circumstances, it is Henry Dago, a Chicago janitor, who gained the reputation of one of the most famous foreign artists in the world after his death. Foreign artists are a new word to describe those artists who are on the edge of society. They have never been educated in art or art history, and only rely on their own talents to create their own works.

1892, Dago was born in the slums of Chicago. He is undoubtedly a person who lives on the edge of society. When he was 4 years old, his mother died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to his sister, and her sister was adopted immediately. His father is a cripple. At the age of eight, he was sent to a Catholic boy's home and then to a shelter for mentally retarded children in Illinois. There, he received terrible news. People say that his father has passed away. /kloc-at the age of 0/7, he ran away from home and found a job in a Catholic hospital in the city. In this unstable shelter, he spent nearly 60 years rolling bandages and cleaning the floor.

1932, Dago rented a single room on the second floor of a boarding apartment at No.85 Webster Street1,which belongs to the ruined land in the city and is the site of the working class. He lived there until 1972. After that, he was too ill to take care of himself and had to go to St. Augustine Catholic Hospital. Coincidentally, his father also died there. After he moved out, his landlord, Nathan Lerner, decided to clean up the garbage that had accumulated in the house for forty years. He hired a handyman and called another tenant named David Boglund to help him pull out piles of old newspapers, shoes, broken glass and empty bottles, all of which were hoarded by a man who concentrated on collecting waste.

At some point in the cleaning process, berglund began to find some paintings that exuded almost supernatural brilliance: these beautiful and confusing watercolors depicted naked little girls with penises on their bodies. They play in the ever-changing scenery, and some backgrounds contain fascinating fairy tale elements: clouds with faces and winged creatures playing in the sky. There are also well-designed color pictures depicting large-scale painful scenes and carefully depicted scarlet blood pools. Boglund showed these paintings to Lerner, who was an artist and immediately realized the value of these works.

In the following months, they found a large number of works, including more than 300 paintings and thousands of pages of handwritten content. Most of the plots take place in a continuous different world, an unreal country, and Dago's energy and enthusiasm in that world far exceed that of Chicago, the city where he lives every day. Many people's lives are limited, but the breadth and richness of Dago's inner world are still shocking. He began to write this "country" sometime between 19 10 and 19 12. By then, he had escaped from the shelter, but no one knew how long he had been thinking about it, and no one knew how long he had been thinking about it. The story of Vivian girl is the story of Vivian girl in the so-called unreal world. The Gran Ecological Angel War Storm caused by ChildSlave Rebellion finally reached 15 145, becoming the longest novel in history.

As predicted by this lengthy title, Fantasy Country depicts the process of a bloody civil war. The war took place on a fictional planet, and our own earth revolved around it like a satellite. Like the American Civil War, this war was also caused by slavery, specifically, slavery against children. In fact, the role played by children is one of the most striking elements in this work. When well-dressed adult men are fighting with each other, seven young girls and sisters act as spiritual leaders against the evil Grandien Leonard. The victims of their atrocities are little girls, who are usually naked and show off their male reproductive organs.

Vivian girls have unlimited adaptability. Just like the heroines in comics, they can withstand any degree of violence and escape from every danger. But other children are not so lucky. Both words and pictures vividly show that "the countryside" is an endless cruel place. In the garden full of huge colorful flowers, the naked little girl was strangled, crucified, tortured to death and her stomach was cut open. These are just routine procedures, and the death penalty is executed by people in uniform. It was this element in his works that later led to accusations of sadism and pedophilia.

In those years, Dago also wrote a novel "The Madhouse: Further Adventures in Chicago", which was also an autobiography and many diaries. However, despite his amazing creativity, he obviously never tried to show, publicize or talk about his works to others, but kept them in three small boarding rooms. In this way, it may not be difficult to understand why when Boglund went to St. Augustine's Hospital to ask Dage about his amazing discovery of Webster Street, Dage refused to talk about it. He left a mysterious message "It's too late" and asked them to destroy these works. Later, he refused his words, saying that he could leave them with Lerner for safekeeping.

Anyway, when Dago, who was 8 1 year-old, died on April 3, 1973, he didn't say a word about the things he left behind, the works of art he worked so hard to create for so many years. Since Dago has no living relatives, Lerner and his wife have taken on the role of advocating, publicizing, coordinating and promoting Dago's position in the art world, and selling his increasingly valuable paintings to private collectors, galleries and museums.

Few artists' works have entered the public's field of vision in batches under such circumstances, and the contact with the creators has been cut off so decisively. Under the circumstances that the content is both disturbing and incomprehensible, the problem becomes particularly serious. In the 40 years since Dago's death, art historians, scholars, museum directors, psychologists and journalists have passionately expounded their theories around his creative intentions and roles. These views have nothing in common, but on the whole, they all agree that Dago is an unparalleled artist from abroad, a neglected and lonely person who has not received professional guidance and training, and he almost certainly suffers from some kind of mental illness. The extreme violence and unobstructed physical state in his works will inevitably lead to various shocking interpretations. For many years, he has been diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia. His first biographer, John McGregor, publicly pointed out that his thoughts are no different from those of a pedophile or a serial killer. Such an accusation was made in Days Never Fade.

In my opinion, this second act of Dago's life coincides with the loneliness in the first act: people deprived him of his dignity and drowned or drowned the voice he managed to make in extremely difficult circumstances. What he created diverted others' fears and fantasies about loneliness, and also avoided the potential pathological side of loneliness. In fact, many books and articles about him seem to focus on our cultural anxiety and discuss the psychological consequences of loneliness, while ignoring that the artist is also a real, breathing and living person.

In fact, this way of reading makes me feel particularly anxious, and I am gradually addicted to the idea that I want to know and read Dago's own unpublished memoir, The History of My Life. Some of these chapters have been published on other occasions, but they have never appeared in their entirety. This is another form of silence, especially when so many words have been published around his life.

After doing some homework, I found that this manuscript, together with other works and many paintings of Dago, was part of the collection purchased by the American Folk Museum from the Lerners in the 1990s. I wrote a letter to the curator and asked if I could visit. She agreed and promised me a week (that is the greatest privilege) to read his manuscript and the words he really used to record his tracks in this world.