Vivian Gornick 에세이집 "Taking a Long Look" 에서

Vivian Gornick, "Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture,

Literature, and Feminism in Our Time" (2021)

 

 

In Alfred Kazin :

 

"In 1942, at the age of 27, he[Alfred Kain] published a truly

seminal book of literary criticism, On Native Grounds, that

made so strong a case for the value of American literature

it helped break the stranglehold that European fiction had

long had on the minds of the American intelligentsia."

 

In Herman melville :

 

"Hawthorne, during a visit with Melville in Liverpool, wrote

in his journal: 'It is strange how he persists ... in wondering

to-and -fro over these [theological] deserts ... He can neither

believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief, and he is too

honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other

... he has a very high and noble nature.'"

 

In The Reading Group :

 

"Argument in the group leaves us, as George Meredith

said good conversation should leave you, feeling refreshed

by the opportunity to experience social intercourse as an act

of self-expansion."

 

"When Myra's turn came she amazed us all by stating flatly

that it mattered not at all that [H. G.] Wells had whitewashed

his own story [in Experiment in Autobiograhy]. It mattered

only that in this memoir we had a profoundly satisfying

evocation of an atmosphere of mind."

 

In Primo Levi :

 

"Once after what proved to be the final selection for the gas

chamber, a man in his hut fell to his knees thanking God out

loud that he had not been chosen, even though a man lying

in the bunk above him had been. Of this incident, Levi wrote,

'If i was god, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer.' Nevertheless, Levi

could understand the Kuhns all around him."

 

In Hannah Arendt :

 

"The idea of responsible world citizenship became key for

Arendt. It led her to the passionate conviction that the

sovereign state must come to an end, as nationalism in the

twentieth century had, clearly, proved itself the enemy of

humanity. The state, she thought, should give way to

federated commonwealths, each composed of a system of

local governments -- townships, councils, soviets -- within

which majorities and minorities would no longer be

accorded differential rights."

 

"She was still passionate about the Jews -- 'the wrong

done by my own people grieves me more than wrong

done by other peoples' -- only now the passion, instead

of glowing red hot, burned like dry ice."

 

"Among those who objected forcefully to the book

[Eichmann in Jerusalem] was the Israeli scholar Gershom

Scholem, who wrote Arendt a much-publicized letter,

complaining bitterly of the book's coldness, and accusing

her of having 'no love of the Jewish people.'"