5 March 2025

Seeing endless faces in the city brings me comfort and relief

I think of how I grew up in a village where everyone knew me, and how I couldn’t wait to escape.

Sometimes you choose a book, and sometimes it chooses you. This happened to me the other day in the bookshop when my eye was caught by a title – The Odd Woman and the City. It was a collection of non-fiction writings by Vivian Gornick, and on the inside front cover was this extract: “Every night when I turn the lights out in my 16th-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and I feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.”

“Jesus, that’s me,” I thought, before heading to the till. I mean, it’s not literally me. I don’t live on the 16th floor, and she’s writing about New York not London. But I do live on a hill from where, at night, I look out over the lights of the city, and like herI feel a powerful sense of relief and comfort and joy thinking of all the other people out there.

This feeling has become stronger as I’ve got older. Being away from the city has never totally suited me, but now I find the countryside quite alien, especially at night, when looking at the darkness fills me with a kind of horror, the absence of people seeming ominous and oppressive.

I have lost the knack of taking comfort in nature. In lockdown I learned the names of wildflowers, and dug a pond, and watched damselflies mating, and I can’t recognise that person in me any more. Perhaps the enforced immersion in the natural world has left an imprint, or aftershock. The idea of being deprived of contact with people again is terrifying.

The Vivian Gornick book is full of those who feel the same. She quotes the poet Frank O’Hara, who wrote that the city contained all the nature he needed – “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don’t totally regret life.”

That made me laugh out loud. She goes on to describe Samuel Johnson in the 1740s, walking the streets of London in a battle with his chronic depression. Much of the city at that time was dirty, impoverished and crime-ridden, (plus ça change, you may think) but was still to him infinitely preferable to any alternative. “Johnson,” she writes, “hated and feared village life. The closed, silent streets threw him into despair. In the village his reflected presence was missing. Loneliness became unbearable. The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.”

Ah, that’s it in a nutshell. Having other people around doesn’t make the loneliness of existence go away, but it makes it bearable. Every morning I walk around my local streets, and while I enjoy the feeling of fresh air and sunshine, what I am really after is the sight of other humans, all with their own troubles, all feeling the difficulties I feel.

God knows, I don’t want to HEAR about their troubles. I like the urban style of interaction, a nod of recognition at most. Gornick describes the characters she passes on the street, mostly anonymous strangers, sometimes only encountered once, sometimes on a regular basis.

“My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I’d rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know.”

So maybe cities are perfect for introverts, and writers. Those of us who like people, at a distance; who like the IDEA of company; who enjoy imagining what others are like. I think of the neighbour I sometimes avoided in the past, but who has moved away, and whose familiar figure I miss. I think of the café owner who knows my order but never makes eye contact or conversation. I think of how I grew up in a village where everyone knew me and how I couldn’t wait to escape, to be surrounded by people who would leave me alone, and help me survive.