Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

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At the funeral a crowd of people spoke: students, colleagues, lovers; readers, fans, swimming companions; friends of childhood and the friends of maturity. No two stories were alike yet only a few themes emerged. The repetitions were vivid, the variations absorbing. Women seemed to speak exclusively of her “powerful eros,” men of her “penetrating intellect”; and each group displayed a kind of bad-tempered contempt for what the other one knew.

Beside me sat the woman who’d replaced me at the cottage the summer after mine. “Do you hear what I’m hearing?” she whispered. I nodded at her. “This is so exactly what Rhoda spent her life looking at.” Then she said, “She was like Keats, all she did was observe what was around her.” I turned in my seat, to stare at my companion. It seemed a thousand years since I’d had such a thought about Rhoda. The woman got up to speak.

“It was in conversation with Rhoda,” she said, “that I changed from a smart girl into a thinking person. With her the line of insight began to draw itself out of me. My stride lengthened, my grasp was extended.”

A student of Rhoda’s got up. “She taught me how to listen to the conversation in my head,” he said. “From her I learned that the struggle would be to talk to myself.”

Another student spoke. “She was always surprising us. We went to see Platoon with her one night. We all hated it and went on and on about the movie glorifying war. ‘I liked it,’ Rhoda said. ‘Wha-a-t!’ we all yelled at her. She beamed at us. ‘Have you ever seen such a wonderful depiction of the miserable obedience of men?’ she said. We would never have thought of that ourselves.”

“She had two stories she told over and over again,” said a friend of thirty years. “Parables, she never tired of them. In one a woman falls off an ocean liner. Hours later, she’s missed. The crew turns the ship around and they go back. They find her because she’s still swimming. In the other a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive, and survives. Rhoda would always find an opportunity and start telling one of them as though I’d never heard it before. Sometimes it was as if she’d never heard it before. That probably says more about her life than anything else. The despair, the boredom, the loneliness. It all translated for her into, The species is doomed, it will destroy itself, but ya gotta keep swimming.”

Bullshit, I started to say to myself, rage was the sea she floated in, the water she never …

Suddenly the words died in me. The familiar thought refused to complete itself. I saw that it was myself I was talking about. It had always been myself I was talking about. I had never really known Rhoda, never seen her whole. I had used her as I needed to use her.

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