A Plea for Eros

being alive to see it. That thought has never left me.
    The lesson of these brutal shifts of fortune ran deep. For some people, cruelty came easily, shamelessly. For me, every unkind word I uttered was followed by a merciless guilt and remorse I could hardly bear. I continue to be preoccupied with these differences among people. The mysteries of personality aren’t easily parsed, but it is certain that human beings run the gamut from the highly empathetic to the absolutely cold. The secret lies in our bodies and in the stories of our lives with other people, in the dark nuances of repetitions and interruptions.
    It’s the summer of 1968, and most of the day and into the night I read. I read one book after another. The hooks excite and agitate me. I can’t stop reading during the day, and for the first time in
my life I suffer from ongoing insomnia. One night at two o’clock in the morning, I am still awake. I have been reading
David Cop-perfield,
but I’ve put it down from exhaustion. I get out of bed and walk to the window. I lift aside the shade and look into the night that isn ‘t night but isn ‘t daylight either. A pale yellow-green haze illuminates the rows of houses in front of me. It’s Reykjavik in June. There are no people outside and no noises. Everyone is asleep. Standing there, I am struck by a strong but pleasant sadness. All my anxiety leaves me as I look outside. I stand and look for a while longer and then return to bed.
    Again and again, I have seen those houses in that queer light through the window. The memory is stubborn and potent. Why is this memory so insistent when others have vanished? Unlike the evening when I watched the snowfall, I didn’t tell myself to remember that view, but it returns to me all the time. The memory carries a feeling of melancholy that is linked to both reading and sleeplessness. The experience of David’s childhood had been an enormous one for me. By the time I looked out that window, I had lived through the sadism of Mr. Murdstone, the death of Dearest, the tenderness of button-popping Peggotty, the flinty goodness of Aunt Betsey, and the wonders of Mr. Dick, a character who remains one of my favorites in all of literature. It was that summer I began to nurse the fantasy of becoming a writer. The books made me feel deep and alive, as if these stories were closer to me than anything else. No one could have been less orphaned than I was with my two loving and attentive parents, and yet the sufferings of David Copperfield and Jane Eyre touched on my old sore. I surrendered the whole force of my empathy to the hero and heroine of those novels. Nevertheless, when I read about their sufferings and humiliations, my grief for them was a kind of safe translation—a reinvention of my own emotional life. Through them, I was able to make a turn in myself, and somehow that view from the window seen alone and at night has become an image for what I now recognize as the end of my childhood.
    When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don’t mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group—uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can’t exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power. In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist.
    But even then, I didn’t believe all the rhetoric—the puerile drivel that escaped the lips of people like Abby Hoffman and members of the Chicago Seven. The