Vivian Gornick

Tony Hoagland recommended Vivian Gornick's book of essays, Approaching Eye Level to me in April. When I started it, I was a little disappointed. I realized that her observations were that of a person so different from me that it was difficult to relate to them / her. She is a New Yorker, a writer, in her 50's or so, a child of the 60's, radical free thinker, person of solitude, urban . . .

It took me time. Her words were beautifully written, and I appreciated that. Towards the end of the book, it began to ring for me. The essays: at the university, murders of the soul, on living alone, and on letter writing were fantastic! I connected with her and the stories and they started to belong to me as well.

A few favorites: "I have loved these people - how I have loved them! - and all for the same reason. I am hungry for the sentence structure in their heads. It's the conversation between us that makes me love them. Responding to the shape of their sentences, my own grow full and free: thought becomes expressive, emotioins clarify, and I am happy, happier than at any other time. Nothing makes me feel more alive, and in the world, than the sound of my own mind working in the presence of one that's reponsive."

" ... conversation is not a daily requirement; expressive language has passed out of common usage; people speak to transmit information, not to connect."

" ... daily depression eats energy. Without energy inner life evaporates; without inner life there is no animation; without animation there is no work. A life in thrall to daily depression is doomed to mediocrity.

In the same moment I saw that this was loneliness, the thing itself. Loneliness was the evaporation of inner life. Loneliness was me cut off from myself. Loneliness was the thing nothing out there could cure."

"This morning my phone rant at nine o'clock. It was my friend (insert name here) ... She launched into a familiar tale of discontent ... The subject is territory we have traversed many times over many years, yet it remains absorbing to both of us, useful in fact. My friendship with ... is an intimacy of more than two decades characterized by a running commentary on the dailiness of our lives and conducted almost entirely on the telephone. When we talk we each cradle the receiver, stare unseeing into the emptiness of the rooms we occupy, and concentrate on the exchange. Inevitably, these conversations are laced through with our mutual intensities ... and within minutes it is often clear that once again we are pursuing our ongoing interest - the nature of well - being - as thought the long distance call is a seminar in which we are both permanently enrolled." (I added the open ended friends, as I have several that fit this description.)

I can't wait to read her other book, The End of the Story of Love.