Diary: Amina Cain on Solitude

Augustus Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Image from the cover of A Horse at Night: On Writing, by Amina Cain

When I was a teenager in Ohio, I dreamed regularly of leaving, and my daydreams were almost entirely made up of me walking around a city by myself, never with another person, or I was in an apartment alone at night making myself a meal. For a time I wanted to live in Manhattan, and in my mind I saw it like the camera sees it in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, that film made up of beautifully held long shots of New York City. In certain scenes, you hear only the sounds of the city, and then the voice-over comes in, like a wave that flows warmly over everything, insistent, and mesmerizing in that insistence, and then is gone. The text of this voice-over is made up of letters Akerman’s mother sent her from Belgium, and the voice is Akerman’s, so that you are hearing her voice, and these letters that are addressed to her, but you never see her. Rather you see through her eyes. The letters seem as if they are for you, and in this way you are alone in that city too. For me, News from Home embodies solitude.