On Loneliness
On Insomnia
Elizabeth Gumport
In “In Which We’re Up All Night,” Elizabeth Gumport takes an artful dive into the mind & experience of insomnia. Before we jump into Gumport’s piece, I would like to note that – as someone who has struggled with insomnia for nearly half my life – there are no good depictions of insomnia in most media. In fact, most of the time there are no depictions of insomnia in media. The only time it felt acknowledged was in the first act of David Fincher’s Fight Club, when Edward Norton’s character refers to insomnia as the state of “never really being asleep, and never really being awake,” which, alongside Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth’s jump cuts and sequence of dolly zooms, illustrates the insomniac’s lived experience of reality.
In fact – I do not believe that most people who have not lived through insomnia can understand the experience – and how it shapes one’s fears. Gompert underscores this idea with a beautiful passage.
All it takes is one bad night. That bad night begets others: once you know you might not be able to sleep, you can't. Recognizing that staying awake all night is a very real possibility, something that could actually happen, is no different than realizing that your boyfriend might no longer be interested in you, or that the friendship you thought was indestructible is, in fact, as vulnerable as anything else, or that you could very well not succeed at doing the work you so badly want to do…To see the abyss is to take the first step towards it.
Later, she describes the “adjustment of attitude” that a life with insomnia entails; the reframing of lost rest as an opportunity to write, or clean, or read – any of the productive acts that can divert your attention from the peace you have forfeited.
It's not that you ‘can't sleep.”’You're simply ‘resting’or ‘cleaning’ or ‘working late.’
Gumport also traces the elaborate emotional trajectory of a night captained by insomnia. In the metropolis, especially, the insomniac has the divine delight of being witness to the otherworldly – described as “walking around Manhattan after a blizzard.” However, it is also accompanied by the terror that only a solitary visit to the far expanses of the universe can inspire. Other people’s still-lit windows – both a source of amusement and solidarity – can become death knells. She likens one neighbor’s window as “your first mate, your loyal officer” before it abruptly clicks off – or “jumps ship”, as she puts it.
And then, of course, Gumport lights upon the real bogeyman at the end of the hallway – the honest, unvarnished confessional that erupts; a brutalist-architecture style diatribe from you, to you, laced with just the right amount of insight to carve itself into your soul, and lacking just enough compassion to indict your spirit.
What comes next is worse. What comes next is a catalogue of everyone you did wrong, everyone you betrayed, everyone you loved less, or worse, than you should have…and if at this point you don't take another Ambien what follows is even more brutal. Why stop at listing everyone you've ever hurt? Why not see if you can think of every single thing you've ever done wrong in your whole entire life?
Your exhausted brain can no longer apply the pressure needed to repress your memories, and they all come back, all of them, every one, and especially the ones that prove you are the worst version of yourself: the lies, the evasions, the unreturned emails, the shoplifted packs of gum.
Nighthawks (1942)
Edward Hopper
Maria Popova is a writer and the woman behind Brain Pickings – perhaps my favorite site on the web. With Brain Pickings, Popova (a C’07 Penn grad) has crafted a treasure trove of beautiful musings on art, literature, life, and everything in between. Here, she surveys, in her signature layered manner, Olivia Laing’s 2016 book The Lonely City, an artistic, spiritual memoir of sorts. Through the work of Warhol, Darger, Wojnarowicz, and of course, Hopper, Laing explores loneliness in the urban landscape, tracing her four muses’ arcs through the metropolis, alighting upon the emotional immediacy of her artistic journey. Popova writes:
But just as it would be unfair to call Laing’s masterpiece only a ‘memoir,’ it would be unfair to call these threads ‘art history,’ for they are rather the opposite, a kind of ‘art present’ — elegant and erudite meditations on how art is present with us, how it invites us to be present with ourselves and bears witness to that presence, alleviating our loneliness in the process.
Popova goes onto to praise Laing’s ability to explore “the [subtle] textures of experience,” touching the (quixotically) democratic nature of loneliness, specifically examining Hopper’s admission – “I probably am a lonely one” – and how his body of work illustrated that admission. And if I may, for a moment, digress; while Popova highlights Laing’s examination of the the iconic fluorescence of Hopper’s most famous work – that pallid glow of isolation – I would posit that perhaps even more important is the sentiment Hopper infuses into his environments. There is an ethereal quality to the settings that Hopper creates; his characters feel adrift, possessing a unique stillness even for the visually abstracted.
Take Office in a Small City. The whole painting is an exercise in restraint on a canvas of muted blues & grays. The bare trappings of the room – the ‘office,’ as it were – transition to the chalk-like walls seamlessly, almost inevitably. The trademark brownstones of New York City, with their clearly earthy overtones, give way easily to the distant, brightless sky. The sole occupant of the work sits at this window-desk, framed twice over within the four corners of the tapestry. His body – indeed, his entire posture – has this sense of being recently untethered, bringing to mind the instant between letting go and falling down. The moment of unexpected slack, if you will. His hand, resting upon the lip of his desk, embodies that same suddenness.
But those are all the details that evidence Hopper’s technical prowess; what elevates him is his ability to capture a very specific emotion – not just loneliness, but a particular strand of loneliness, a loneliness that is explicitly, pulsatingly aware of the webs of connections right outside the door, a loneliness that is filled in through contrast, through relief, the chiaroscuro of belonging and exclusion. What Hopper manages to invoke is the subjective experience of loneliness; how, for the lonely, everything around them, in all its hues & textures, fades into an ephemeral landscape.
Hopper’s ethos, though melancholic, is not one of sadness – at least, not sadness in the saturated sense of the term. It is akin to the thin layer of sea foam atop a wave as it crashes onto shore; a light layer of dust that coats the surroundings. The figures in Hopper’s paintings carry this feeling of – as Wallace put it – “having had and lost some infinite thing.” They are a little bit sad, all the time – and it is the prospect of getting close to their sorrow that unsettles us – for fear that it may strike a chord too close to our own pain.
Marina Keegan, Yale Class of 2012
And to close, I leave you with a piece a dear friend sent to me on a crisp fall day that broke my heart.
I hope you, too, smile before you cry.
