Approaching Eye Level

There are mornings I awake and, somehow, I have more of myself.  I swing my lefts 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 don’t want it.  What I want is to take this self I now 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 the 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 stranger’s 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 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 another — everyone in front of me old, ugly, deformed, and diseased — I 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 minute — the variety and inventiveness of survival technique — is 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.

—Vivian Gornick