When David Bowie died I was a long way from home. I live alone, anyhow; but the added distance from England made his death more difficult to bear. In the early hours, I watched a video of him singing “John, I’m Only Dancing”, and saw, in the blackness behind him, my own face in the screen. Yet when I connected to Twitter that morning, I suddenly had the impression – the illusion – that in my grief for someone I had never met, I was not alone.
Bowie once declared that all his work was about loneliness and isolation. He sang about and predicted the alienating influences of late-20th- and early-21st-century culture in a manner that would make him eminently suitable for inclusion in Olivia Laing’s new book, The Lonely City – an evocation of what she concedes is an old-fashioned, analogue art: “I used to read like that, back in the age of paper, the finished century, to bury myself in a book, and now I gazed at the screen, my cathected silver lover.”
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