Courtesy of striking French air traffic controllers, I had a longer journey back from Toulouse than I’d expected today, and managed to read the whole of Olivia Laing’s thought-provoking book [amazon_link id=”1782111239″ target=”_blank” ]The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”1782111239″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone[/amazon_image]

It wasn’t what I’d expected from the reviews, which made it seem like a kind of travelogue about her having some time alone in New York and reflecting on modern urban life; I’m a sucker for books about sitting in foreign cafes feeling a sense of anomie while writing in one’s notebook. Instead, [amazon_link id=”1782111239″ target=”_blank” ]The Lonely City[/amazon_link] is more a sort of successor to Susan Sontag’s [amazon_link id=”0141187123″ target=”_blank” ]Illness as Metaphor[/amazon_link] with a soupcon of Patti Smith’s [amazon_link id=”0747568766″ target=”_blank” ]Just Kids[/amazon_link]. Through her research into the work and lives of four artists who engaged with and battled with loneliness, but also with poverty, rejection, AIDS, Laing actually gives us a profound discussion of society’s inability to tolerate difference.

She also reflects on the role of our use of digital contact through social media and always being online – using it as a shield against human contact and at the same time a means of human contact. Laing notes the trajectory of Sherry Turkle’s assessment of digital tech through her trilogy, [amazon_link id=”0262701111″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Self[/amazon_link] (1984), [amazon_link id=”0684803534″ target=”_blank” ]Life on the Screen[/amazon_link] (1995) and the far more pessimistic [amazon_link id=”0465031463″ target=”_blank” ]Alone Together[/amazon_link] (2011).

Andy Warhol, one of the artists discussed by Laing, predates Twitter and Facebook. What would he have done with them, I wonder?