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Vivian Gornick writes about the connection between
her own state of mind and the strangers she encounters on
a walk across Manhattan in her 1996 essay On the
Street, Nobody Watches, Everybody Performs.
There are mornings I awake and, somehow, I have more
of myself. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, draw
up the blind, and, from my sixteenth-floor window, feel the
city spilling itself across my eyes, crowding up into the
world, filling in the landscape. Behind it, there in the distance,
where it belongs, is the Hudson River and, if I want it, the
sky. But I dont want it. What I want is to take this
self I how have more of down into those noisy, dirty, dangerous
streets and make my way from one end of Manhattan to the other
in the midst of that crowd that also may have more of itself.
There is no friend, lover or relative I want to be with as
much as I want to swing through the streets being jostled
and bumped, catching the eye of the stranger, feeling the
strangers touch. In the street I am grinning like an
idiot to myself, walking fast at everyone coming my way. Children
stare, men smile, women laugh right into my eyes. The tenderness
I encounter in that mood! The impersonal affection of a palm
laid against my arm or my back as someone murmurs, Excuse
me, and sidles skillfully past my body: it soothes beyond
reasonable explanation. I feel such love then, for the idea
of the city as well as the reality. And everyone looks good:
handsome, stylish, interesting. Life spills over without stint
and without condition. I feel often that I am walking with
my head tipped back, my mouth thrown open, a stream of sunlight
on water pouring into my throat. When I consider the days
on which I find myself looking into one gargoyle face after
an other everyone in front of me old, ugly, deformed,
and diseasedI have to realize the street gives me back
a primitive reflection of whatever load of hope or fear I
am carrying about with me that day.
Nothing heals me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through
the very city I often feel denying me. To see in the street
the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human until
the very last minutethe variety and inventiveness of
survival techniqueis to feel the pressure relieved,
the overflow draining off. I join the anxiety. I share the
condition. I feel in my nerve endings the common refusal to
go under. Never am I less alone than alone in the crowded
street. Alone, I imagine myself. Alone, I buy time. Me, and
everyone I know. Me, and all the New York friends.
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