It has always been said that there is nothing worse than feeling alone being around people. That kind of melancholic admiration for the lives of others, awash in the complete sensation of lack or absence, can be brutally paradoxical.
But it is also said that the definition of melancholy is: the happiness of being sad. This very alternative definition already offers a different magnitude to loneliness. Creativity is sensed in solitude, pure feeling is guessed and it is recognized, by simple contrast, that at some point he was happy, absolutely happy.
This book comes to speak of that creativity born of nostalgia accumulated in the lonely hours. A certain point of magic lingers between these pages that describe sadness but also emotional and physical passion, which confronts us with the ultimate truth but makes us enjoy the little truths that remain. And this book The Lonely City teaches us the creative loneliness of some characters who share, from the deepest well of the human soul, the shreds of the general existence of the human being.
Living is a lot about that, of recognizing the vital defeat at each step taken, of facing that the hands that take you will one day go away, of wanting to paint or write your perspective of the world to be able to explain how you see that loneliness that awaits us. everybody.
And in the end this story is vital, because in solitude there are great doses of lucidity to repudiate the artificial and the material and stay with the spiritual and the intangible. Because in the end, when we all escape from our last moments of loneliness, we can only enjoy a vague memory that disappears at the last point of light that our eyes see.
You can buy the book The lonely city, the latest novel by Olivia Laing, here: