Vivian Gornick did a reading at Vassar last night. The pieces that she read drew upon her early discovery of feminism. Listening to her I thought about the number of times people invoke the mantra of “the personal is political,” and how often it means nothing, unless you have the kind of clarity and insight that Gornick shows in making sense of ordinary experience. In my introduction to her talk, however, I read from her biting essay “At the University: Little Murders of the Soul,” mainly because it paints so brilliantly the air that I inhale:

At Stirling they hadn’t known Derrida from an insurance agent. At the University of the Farwest they not only knew who Derrida was, they knew the name of his publisher and the size of his last advance. Stirling was time warp: a place where everything important had occurred years ago, and people were now living with the outcome of lives long decided. At Farwest nothing was settled and no one had made peace. The department quivered with restless ambition.

Eight men and one woman taught writing there. They were novelists and poets in the mid or late fifties, many of them had achieved a moment of fame during the sixties. I soon discovered that each of them held the place they found themselves in at a discount. One and all thought they belonged somewhere better. The atmosphere reeked of brooding courtesies and subterranean tensions. I did not for a long time understand exactly what it was I was looking at. I had never before encountered mass depression.