The Seeker Academy Bookblog

L. D. Gussin is the author of the literary novel The Seeker Academy and of the bookblog theseekeracademy.com. Like most writers, he is a reader, and notes as an influence the critic Erich Auerbach, who helped to guide him through the Western tradition. Also, like many writers he had to earn time to read and write, and did so first as a waiter (at a Norwegian ski hotel, at an 8^th Avenue fish house that fed stage technicians and retired ILGWU members, at a Mob-friendly Detroit veal-and-spaghetti joint, at a Back Bay Polish restaurant opened to support Solidarity, at a below-ground Pioneer Square soup dive as the first of many other, similar jobs in hippie Seattle, as—at the weary end—the kids tables waiter for a caterer of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs), and then, since 1987, as one among the digerati.

Led by bad luck to waste his classroom years, Gussin recalls misreading Chaucer over a summer in Ann Arbor, Hannah Arendt and the Russian novelists during seasons of antiwar protest, Melville and Eric Erikson at a junior college, and Ram Dass while freighting westward near the Azores. He walked the hills above the Sea of Galilee, visited Hardy’s house, rented a hut because it was on land where Wordsworth—whom he couldn’t grasp—once lived, copied Four Quartets and other works in longhand, read the Old Testament with a trapped-in-suburbia rabbi who’d survived the Holocaust, walked a route past Roethke’s Seattle house and hunted for the Roethke greenhouse in Saginaw, and spent an openmouthed month in the Peleponnese. The lucky effect of his wayward movement was that when he came to the last part of King Lear he could follow along.

Having passed this exam but failed as a writer of stories, because of a hitch in perspective and because nearly everyone fails, blinking finally, he found himself looking at life. What you’ve learned won’t help you now, he seemed to hear—though the loutish tone that life took with him made him doubt his hearing. Faced away from him, two men (was one a ventriloquist?) crouched before a computer display. You’ll help us to explain what this means, said one of the men. We are speaking specifically, said the other.

Thus, slipping behind the technology-business curtain, he began a third (early bad luck being first) journey. Learning the abstractions by which the perfect egg of the moment was made, and the conventions by which it was sold, he saw the egg become something people wanted, and so change people’s lives and create wealth. He toiled among the abstractions and conventions, the paychecks and the big ideas. Yet, he also (life either had mislead him or he’d really heard wrong) saw that his literary imagination, mindful and so ultimately spiritual, remained alive.