You can read the title essay on-line here: "The Opposite of Loneliness." Excerpt:
Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.The Alice Gregory quote selected for the post title creates an inference that she loves the book, since the review exists. You'd have to be an out-and-proud churl to write a negative review and Gregory is flaunting her sensitivity. She tells us how she left the book sitting on her "kitchen table for days, beside the salt cellar, a candle, and a bowl of tangerines."
This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.
This kitchen-table still life is annoying me. It's so milk-and-toast-and-honey-and-a-bowl-of-oranges-too. The review pours out like butterscotch and sticks to all your senses.
Posts
11 comments:
A book that, once you put it down, you can't pick up again.
When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from 1814 until the summer of 1820; and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats's three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only 200 copies. His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before his last visit to Rome....
Keats was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime. Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, "I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."
Seven weeks after the funeral Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonaïs. Clark saw to the planting of daisies on the grave, saying that Keats would have wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls, made new windows, doors and flooring. The ashes of Shelley, one of Keats’s most fervent champions, are buried in the cemetery and Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats. Describing the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".
No "would have beens" here.
___
From the Wikipedia entry on John Keats. I transposed the last paragraph from earlier in the article.
Car crashes do provide a dramatic ending, if one is so lucky, art-wise.
"she left the book sitting on her "kitchen table for days, beside the salt cellar, a candle, and a bowl of tangerines.""
Annoying isn't the word. Enragingly vomitous would better describe any sane person's reaction to that bit of twee self-stroking.
Sounds like a Tom Friedman column. "If I could speak with Vladimir Putin, I would say 'Vlad, I left your book on my kitchen table, next to a salt cellar, a candle and a bowl of tangerines.' Let me explain...."
No, seriously, who has something they refer to as a "salt cellar" on their table? Is it so they can more pointedly seat some people "below the salt"?
Does she seat guests on a davenport too?
Gregory's review isn't that obnoxious in context. It basically says her preconceptions were wrong and the content is very, very good.
But first we must learn that to see the online essays posthumously marketed in book form caused the reviewer anticipatory embarrassment and revulsion as she fell into a still life state of mind.
But was it sea salt?
I couldn't relate to the essay, maybe because I can't relate to the initial loneliness she experienced.
Maybe it was a benefit not to 'that smart', in seems the gifted kids in school were so focused on their academics and extra curricular activities that not until college they had a change to hang out and bond.
I take the kitchen vignette as an allusion to Well's unpardoned and wholly incisive review of Henry James: at the center of any Henry James novel, an altar, "And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string. . . .” In other words, we could sum the review as "Meow."
No one would be reading this if the young woman who died was still alive or hadn't gone to Yale. Or, let's be honest, if she was ugly. I'm sorry she died, but is this really any different than any one else who dies in a car accident at a young age?
I'm always annoyed by the assumption that the lives of the elite require all of us to pay attention. It's all so tragic when something goes wrong in a life that's been planned out since birth.
A year ago there was a brief burst of hand-wringing about a young woman who was killed in Afghanistan while working for the State Department. Again, I'm sorry she died, but there was nothing said about the young soldiers who died with her. It wasn't like she'd done anything significant yet, either. So many of these tragic-elite stories are about what the young victim would have been. But that's true of everyone, isn't it?
Elite sob stories aren't very interesting because there's nothing special about death. Everyone dies, and in death we are all equal.
Post a Comment