noted. 05/18/2012

• The Lonely Ones – The New Inquiry

  • In Gornick’s 1978 collection, Essays on Feminism, she argues that, at least for women, solitude is necessary because marriage, its apparent opposite, usually gets in the way of thinking, growth, self-knowledge. In fact marriage, per Gornick, is the original, distorting expectation imposed on a woman’s life — distorting because it has been viewed, by both men and women, as the “pivotal experience of [a woman’s] psychic development,” her crowning achievement. Gornick outlines the consequences of the idea in one long, electrifying sentence: “It is this conviction, primarily, that reduces and ultimately destroys in women that flow of psychic energy that is fed in men from birth by the anxious knowledge given them that one is alone in this world; that one is never taken care of; that life is a naked battle between fear and desire, and that fear is kept in abeyance only through the recurrent surge of desire; that desire is whetted only if it is reinforced by the capacity to experience oneself; that the capacity to experience oneself is everything.” The promise of marriage is the promise of togetherness, support, safety, and this prevents a woman from taking responsibility for her own life — and therefore ultimately from “experiencing” herself — by removing the motivation behind all important action, which is the terror of aloneness. In Sontag’s envy of those writers who knew how to be alone runs a current of precisely this motivating terror. Her fear of being too much by herself fuels her desire to join the club.
  • we need to learn to love anew. If we can stop being “in love with the ritual of love,” its tired conventions and seductive abstractions, maybe we can achieve a “free, full-hearted, eminently proportionate way of loving.”

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