Tortured Artists and Their Inclination to Loneliness.

Through art, we aim to capture the full spectrum of human emotion. Yet, so much of art falls back into the same themes: Death, love, loneliness, grief, death again. Through exploring how artists depict loneliness and its different manifestations (mainly through windows), we can understand ourselves better.

Looking out of your own window is an intimate act. It challenges your own sense of being. In Evening. Old Florence, a woman perches on the windowsill. Shoulders down and back slouched. She surrenders herself to want and desire, a life bigger than her own.

The window represents hope and possibility. Yet, it also represents loneliness. There is longing in the gaze through the glass. A feeling that what is outside is better than what is inside. The feeling that whatever qualms you have within are settled if you could just step outside yourself. But you are alone. It is 10 p.m., and you watch the world wander despite you. You are stationary as everyone else seems to have places to be, people to be.

I look out of the window and I am presented with a million possibilities to live my life. I am fascinated by the life I could live. Living on the thoroughfare between the City and East, I ask myself who I want to be. M&A, PE, Creative Director, Artist. I am confronted with my past and my future. Yet, I do nothing. I lay in bed and will the day away.

The woman is a lot like us. Trapped in the boundaries and banality of our own selves, of our own comfort. While we do not dare to experience anything else. The fight and contention of these pieces exist only within the subject.

Our loneliness is perhaps a product of our own comfort. We do not dare to feel discomfort. The possibility of judgment or failure petrifies us. We want to live life, any life, other than our own.

“My passion has always been what goes on inside, thoughts, and feelings. It was like a window had opened.” — The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier.

Everyone in this film aches of possibility. Julie constantly feels stuck, uninspired, bored. She feels like a spectator in her own life. She seeks change. Aksel is chasing exhilaration and desire. Our protagonists are framed by windows when these themes our discussed. By the end, Aksel’s windows dim as his cancer worsens. Are we stuck in this never-ending cycle of wanting change? Is it for boredom’s sake? Or to prove to the world that you are worth something, worthy of respect, worthy of love? I question how much of what I desire, what is possible in my life, are things I genuinely want, instead of what I think is expected of me, or what I expect of myself; Am I surrendering to memetic desires? Our protagonists exist in discomfort. Unafraid of their desires and unabashedly eager for possibility. At the eve of your death, would you rather have frozen where two roads diverged in a yellow wood, never advancing? Or would you have rather chosen a path despite the possibility of it being “the wrong path”? It may make Julie the worst person in the world, but it also makes her the bravest. 

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? 

— The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

The window also acts as an invitation. To allow your want to flow onto the streets. It represents what is possible, what might happen. In Night Stories, the subject allows herself desire. She invites it in. The inside is warm and welcoming while darkness streaks the sky. The lover you are willing to come to your door for forgiveness after a fight. The school boy crush, throwing rocks at your window to get your attention. Your friends, clad in colorful helmets on tricycles with tassels on their handles.

This invitation, however, is one that does not exist. She believes that simply by existing, she invites intimacy. In reality, she is reserved, and so are we. We are beings of love and lust. Every book, song, movie, all mediums of art, really, are about love. It is an ancient ritualistic act that has preserved our humanity for millennia. This invitation, to leave a window open for intimacy to enter, is one shrouded in doubt. We lack the bravery to speak our desires out loud, to tell the hot neighbor to come over for dinner, to even strike up a conversation with someone at a bar. We are beings of weak constitutions and stolen glances. So instead, we passively leave the window open, hoping someone is brave enough to blast “In Your Eyes” with a boombox through your window. You can always step back and shut the window, deny any ache for intimacy as it is so guileless and raw, yet juvenile. The best we can do is whisper our illicit, odious yearnings into a tree, and hope its leaves translate the winds into our songs.

“Mira felt that no one in the world understood her, but she wondered if he did. Yet, embarrassed by their similarity, she avoided eye contact with him.” — Pure Colour, Sheila Heti.

Two people in love, impossible circumstances. Tale as old as time. Chow and Su, both unfulfilled in their marriages, both trapped by social convention, “dancing together slowly”. The air between them is dense, and their touch weighs heavily. They are unable to fall into each other, to learn all the soft parts of each other, to be a whole person with each other. All Chow can do is bury his love for Su. “He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane.” They are unable to overcome their loneliness as an opaque veil divides the two, neither brave enough to pierce through.

In Nighthawks, the coldness outside seeps indoors. A man drinks alone while a man and a woman sit uninterested in the company of each other. The panoramic window envelopes the subjects in the cold darkness. Despite the company, they are just as lonely. They are still. Their eyes do not catch the gaze of the other, their hands nearly touch. They peer into their own solitude, isolation so tangible it squeezes their hand reassuringly. Unable to connect with one another, they resign to a life alone. Dancing with phantoms in the amber light of the range hood, hands caressing the small of their own back. Conversely, to look into a window, maybe in a voyeuristic way, or maybe out of childish curiosity, can also illuminate a different facet of loneliness. While looking out of your own window may confront you with your own loneliness. Looking into the window of another may reveal how lonely we all are. And perhaps, we are not so alone in how we feel at all, and through that, we can find some comfort.

“I watch the city slide through my reflection in the window, as though I barely exist within it.” — Milk Teeth, Jessica Andrews.

In Lost in Translation, Charlotte and Bob are both overcome with feelings of isolation and loneliness. Set in Tokyo, it reflects the feeling of aloneness that comes with being in a metropolitan city, also seen in Nighthawks, the latter being set in New York. A feeling that creeps up on you in moments of stillness, despite living in bustling cities. Tokyo, wide and vast, makes Charlotte feel small. The window alienating her from the loud city streets. Again, mirroring the themes of Nighthawks, Charlotte finds a companion in her aloneness with Bob. However, this connection is ephemeral, and there is no resolve. Charlotte and Bob are right where they started. Loneliness prevails despite these tiny moments of connection we take for granted. “It’s about things being disconnected and looking for moments of connection.”

I hope you guys will watch/read the works I discuss here. They are all truly remarkable pieces of art. And maybe, you will derive another interpretation after analyzing them yourself. If you do, do share them with the community. And isn’t that the beauty of art?