Approaching Eye Level 1996 by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick [Gornick, Vivian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

5 At the University: Little Murders of the Soul

The other night at a party in New York I ran into Charlotte; next day in a restaurant I saw Daniel; the day after that in the post office Myra. 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, emotions 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 responsive. Talking with Charlotte or Myra or Daniel the grittiness washes out. Connected to myself, I am now connected to others. Solitude is relieved. I am at peace inside my skin.

Yet in each case I could not hold onto the friendship. I failed to comfort as well as stimulate. With me they did not clarify. In my company each became more fragile, more complicated, more self-involved, not less. I did not give them back themselves as they wished and needed to have themselves returned. In friendship as in love peace is required as well as excitement. Unless both are present, the graft does not take. Connection remains a matter of the unreliable moment. Without steady connection the friendship has no future. In New York anything without a future is instantly flung back into the distracting surge.

Failure of connection among like-minded people is a preoccupation of mine. The people I know are all talkers: people for whom conversation is vital, the kind of people who if they're not talking don't know they're alive. Yet, many is the evening I have sat in my chair after a gathering of some sort staring into the emptiness of the past few hours, thinking about the words spoken among "people like ourselves"; words that should have opened us to ourselves but had in fact shut us down, left us feeling abstract and demoralized. Which, I wonder as I sit alone late at night, was the sentence offered as a stimulation but received as a challenge; the nuance that put Daniel off rather than drew him in; the response that scattered Charlotte's insight and flattened Myra's spirit? Why did it happen so easily, and so often? Why did we come so close, yet remain apart? Everyone in the room was decent, intelligent, literate. We all pulled the same lever in the voting booth, read the same book reviews in the Times. None of us was in real estate or city government. What had gone wrong here? The answer was always the same.

Good conversation is dependent on a simple but mysterious fit of mind and spirit that cannot be achieved, it just occurs. It's not a matter of mutual interests or class concerns or commonly held ideals, it's a matter of

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