Vivian Gornick

But it does become a kind of good exercise.

I know Vivian Gornick, I forgot what the book is called, but she had a whole book that she had published.

It's something business, unfinished business, I think is the title, but it's about her going back and rereading stuff.

That's something that I'm so compelled by.

Welcome back to Revelatorium, the podcast that comes around once a month, just about as often as I take the time to write a letter to someone I care about.

I mentioned in episode 39, I believe, that I've read Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick, and the last essay in that anthology really is about the power of letter writing and how she's lamenting that we're talking on the phone, or at least in that era.

This was, like, pre-2000.

She was like, "We're talking on the phone so much, and we've lost this craft of writing letters," and she's rereading letters from, like, you know, people a generation before her and, like, just really mourning that mode of communication.

Or maybe it's someone that you used to invite to group functions that now you kind of would rather just run into on the street.

I think the role of person you run into on the street and you say hello to is actually a really important one.

And that's also something Vivian Gornick touched upon in Approaching Eye Level.

But like that can be very esteem raising when you see somebody you recognize and they're a part of your campus of your life, but they're not necessarily like living in your dorm or they're not exactly like in a club with you or you're not, you know, like you're not really involving them like in anything like shared, but you are just in shared space together.

A completely different demographic than her, living in a different state thousands of miles away from the downtown New York literati scene.

Right, and on this profile, the young Dallas resident makes multiple references to the writer Vivian Gornick, whose work Greta absolutely loves and cherishes.

Oh, wow, what a specific connection.

It is.

Swipe after swipe of incompatibility, bad photos, and terrible bios makes the world feel incredibly small, bleak, and lonely.

Oh, it really does.

But here, the hyper-specificity of the match, the shared niche love for Vivian Gornick essays, the shared highly specific childhood trauma of the gifted program creates a sense of abundance.

It reminds you that the world is vast and full of complex interior lives.