Blog Layout
World Book Day 2020: Why Solitude Can Be Hard To Read
Kay Carson • 5 March 2020
Many years ago, I received a piece of advice from a female friend: “Don’t feel self-conscious if you are dining alone in a public place,” she said. “I always take a book wherever I go. I focus on what I’m reading, and I don’t look up.”
Today is World Book Day, and her words have suddenly come back to me. During my years as a journalist, I had to fly solo for all sorts of events, often finding myself making small talk with a table full of strangers without batting an eyelid. Eating alone, however, was an odd experience. A table for one, in a room of couples, families and friends, could be excruciating – particularly in the lull between courses (starter and main, that is; I couldn’t have faced pudding on my own).
People-watching is a favourite pastime of mine, but that’s more acceptable in a coffee shop or pavement café, not a restaurant. After one too many pitying looks from a kindly young waiter one evening, I decided to take a figurative leaf out of my friend’s book.
Next time I ventured into an eatery – and once I’d overcome the ingrained self-reproach of reading at the dinner table – I took a carefully chosen paperback out of my bag. Nothing too frivolous or pretentious. In my vivid imagination, I reckoned I must look like one of Edward Hopper’s subjects: alone but not necessarily lonely, existing in a transitory space; like the woman in Compartment C, Car 293
(1938) who is flicking through her reading material, clearly in a world of her own.
By this point in my musings, I realised I had been on the same page for far too long and hadn’t managed to read a single word. Perhaps, then, I was more akin to the preoccupied female in Chair Car
(1965), who is holding a book but not necessarily reading it.
To be perfectly honest, my mealtime reading was short lived, for a number of reasons: a spell in New York, the capital city of singledom, taught me to be less self-conscious; I found that I couldn’t concentrate on reading over dinner because I actually wanted to take in my surroundings; then I met my wife to be, and have never dined alone since.
Nowadays, of course, nobody thinks twice about reading anything, anywhere, mainly because of the proliferation of smartphones and tablets at our disposal. It may be an antisocial practice, but at least we are all in isolation, together.
If we could reimagine the solitary woman in Hopper’s Automat
(1927) scrolling through Twitter on her iPad, the chances are she wouldn’t appear quite as forlorn.
