Andy Warhol’s Secrets for Surviving Isolation

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By Sophie Atkinson

I get sick a lot in the winter, so I spent this past January as I’ve spent many Januaries before it — in bed with a standard-issue flu. As the fever built, my mind hopscotched from one anxiety to the next. Gazing at the ceiling, I’d time-travel to the future — spring would, inevitably, be better: coffees with friends, a weekend hiking group. But when months elapsed and Covid-19 put spring on hiatus, it became clear that I, like anyone else fortunate enough to work from home, would be stuck inside. One restless weekend, close to climbing the walls, I reread "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol."

Toward the end of the ’60s, Warhol gravitated to the written word — in 1969, he started Interview magazine. When a literary agent suggested that he write his autobiography, Warhol told her that the writer Bob Colacello was already working on it. The agent suggested that Warhol write his "philosophy" instead: "I mean, if anyone has a philosophy, it's got to be you."

So Colacello and his fellow ghostwriter Pat Hackett, along with Brigid Berlin, sprang into action, taping interviews with Warhol. According to Steven M.L. Aronson, the book's editor, Warhol viewed "Philosophy" as a kind of self-help book: "He told me that he felt the book could give people a way that they could think, too, and that they could use it to help solve their own problems."

I first read the book seven years ago on a friend's recommendation. But now that I was so miserable indoors, it turned out that I needed its self-help dimension far more than before. The biggest revelation now was that Warhol, a partygoer who could rarely attend a happening without at least a six-person retinue, was an ardent disciple of puttering around his apartment solo. "If I only had time for one vacation every 10 years," he wrote, "I still don't think I’d want to go anywhere. I’d probably just go to my room, fluff up the pillow, turn on a couple of TVs, open a box of Ritz crackers."

Two weeks into isolation, I disabled Screen Time notifications on my iPhone out of sheer self-disgust — my leisure time was too internet-heavy for me to tolerate any record of how much time I now spent parked in front of a screen. During the first months, I did pub quizzes with friends via Zoom and Houseparty, binged entire Netflix series, enrolled in online art-history courses, sank hours into social media scrolling. I started feeling off-kilter — zombified, pre-coffee, even after plenty of caffeine. After weeks of steadily increasing my internet intake, the indoors began to feel uniformly monotonous.

On cracking open "Philosophy," Warhol's version of indoors felt light-years removed from mine. The elaborate, playful activities that Warhol espouses throughout the book make the pre-internet inside sound irresistible: ordering a $3.95 pillow and using it for luxurious baths ("MAKES ME FEEL VERY RICH," he wrote); penning fan letters to the famous writer you admire most or calling him every day until the writer's mother tells you to knock it off; dying your eyebrows different colors from each other; starting a smell museum, so certain smells won't get lost forever; consuming extravagant snacks (guava jam straight from the jar, chocolate-covered cherries, butter pecan ice cream).

Before "Philosophy," I primarily thought of Warhol in terms of his productivity — the wildly prolific artist once told an interviewer that "everybody should be a machine." Finding out that it was the truly mundane details of life that he savored the most — tending to his zits, vacuuming while watching daytime television — set me straight. Warhol didn't appear to think time could be wasted. Instead, he argues, it's "the little times you don't think are anything while they’re happening," and not the parties or adventures or art projects, that are the most significant.

I had always thought that hours at home spent not working or reading were a waste of time, and that leisure was best understood as a verb: traveling or going to a party or an exhibition or a park. As a freelancer, I had framed the hours I spent per week on minutiae or the time I spent in bed ill during winter as time I had squandered, since time equaled money, productivity, self-improvement. Held up to the light, this attitude felt repellent. "Philosophy" and the pandemic itself felt like a first step in battling it.

It has been tempting, months into self-isolation, to abandon ship and try to snap my old life back into place. In Berlin, where I’m based, the restrictions have been eased, and during this sudden surge of optimism, I’ve had to resist old comforts: hugging a friend, sharing a cigarette. Life reassuming its old shape overnight, my long-held wish, seems increasingly unlikely. I can no longer use the outside world — the outdoors, other people, public spaces — for magic.

Reading "Philosophy" reminded me of an obvious truth: I don't need to go outdoors or online to have fun. I didn't metamorphose into a "Philosophy" personality overnight, but I did start sketching out a very silly board game and eating ice cream for breakfast on days when it felt particularly hard to get out of bed. I now maintain a diary-scrapbook mash-up and have traded my leggings for evening wear. Post-"Philosophy," sometimes I now forget about my laptop for a few hours, lose my phone down the side of the sofa and forget about its whereabouts till morning. For the first time in months, life has started to feel a little lighter.

Sophie Atkinson is a British writer and editor.

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