“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social
margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the
city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain
human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the
pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the
common refusal to go under.”—American critic, journalist, essayist, and
memoirist Vivian Gornick,
The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
(2015)
This week seven years ago, I took the picture
accompanying this post while walking through the Clinton Hill neighborhood of
Brooklyn—a section of the New York borough filled with tree-lined streets and
brownstones. At least for me, it held some of the restorative powers that Ms.
Gornick praises.
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