This is so good, Joshua! I'd bookmarked it and am just sitting down to read now. Your metaphors with academia are beautiful. We do love a good survivalist mentality in America, don't we? Perhaps the influence of religion and a Protestant work ethic, the land bringing us closer to God etc etc. And there is so much healing to be found in the wilderness... But yes, loneliness kills. That $500k is tempting but I wouldn't last two days on that show.
Ah, thanks! Yes, there must be some link between Protestant asceticism and survival stories. This all gets entwined with Eastern thought, too, in Transcendentalism and in the revival of that thinking in the 1960s. Glad it resonated with you :)
Hi. This was really good. “Beware the person who is sentimental or morally righteous about something that never existed, or not in the way that they think it did.” Hallelujah. Strongly identify with much of this and honestly will have to take a few scraps back into my hideyhole and maybe reflect more personally on some of your concluding statements. One small note, the Chris McCandless story and his motivations has lately been revisited in a recent episode of the Podcast Youre Wrong About. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000601953095. Worth a listen.
My father moved the family to rural Maine because, as he said, "I was born in the wrong century," by which he meant the 18th. He wanted to retire very early to a farm, and so there we were ... living in a cabin with spring water and a wood stove. We moved to a 19th century farm house down the street a year later. A number of my friends were Back to the Landers and members of communes. My own spiritual home is a glaciated hillside where I can see for miles and the mountains in the distance ... just like that place.
On to grad school. While I saw the same brutal competition, there was less loneliness. I recall vividly how I was almost the only one of my classmates who *wasn't* coping with the stress of doctoral exams through extreme drinking. Our program had do-or-die exams that went on for days. Substance abuse was rampant. Instead, I was addicted to soccer and escaped academia to play in a Spanish-speaking league filled with day laborers. I felt more accepted there than I ever did with academic colleagues. But it's telling ... in the last few years I avoided most academics some by chance and some by design. As a first generation, working class person, I wasn't really one of them, though I didn't hold that against them ... but they certainly did against me.
Ah -- my Uruguayan nickname was "Oso." You must have been a tireless fútbol player.
As I wrote in response to a comment on my other site, I should have clarified that "Alone" captured the *end* of graduate school for me. I didn't find the early stages terribly stressful. Coursework was easy, teaching was fine, research went smoothly. It was the job search that nearly did me in.
It's interesting that men imagine themselves born in the wrong century far more often than women do. Based on my family history, the best time to have been born might have been the late nineteenth century. At least one generation enjoyed a real upgrade in quality of living and freedom. Before that it was nearly all serfdom, and it took most of my young adulthood to climb out of the poverty that followed those initial spikes in fortune. I have a post coming up sometime about how quickly privilege can be lost -- in a single generation. But that is not quite to your point.
The title essay in my memoir meditates on the mountaintop trope. Why do you think being "on top" in that glacial basin is so much more rewarding than being "in the thick of it," the way one must be in the Iowa prairie?
Yes, my technical skills were poor, but my speed was good and my stamina endless. When we faced a team with a particularly skilled player, sometimes I would play man defense across the entire field to both rattle them and shut them down. Sadly, I had to "retire" at 35 because being an academic took too many hours to stay in good enough shape to overcome my relative lack of foot skills. The problem occured when I only had American white guys to play against in Iowa, as typical Americans don't play football ... unless they played straight through college. Amateurs playing against collegiate+ players 10 years younger than them is just not fun.
I didn't say that being "on top" is better than being "in the thick of it." That was just the focus of the moment. You see, almost all the hills are forested, and that momentary glimpse is a rare scene among the trees. What I describe is most of New England and a good part of the eastern Mid-Atlantic. You mention prairie, but despite nearly 20 years of living in the midwest, I've never actually seen much prairie. Most of it is long gone, especially in Illinois and Iowa, as it's just endless corn fields now. I don't see much interesting unless I go to western Nebraska to the arid region in the rain shadow, or perhaps Kansas and the green sea.
Josh, the sacred is in the hidden, don't you know? It is laid bare only on the mount that defies you to claw your way up to it. I fear not the false height of the cloud! I laugh at the cyclone tantrums!
Speaking of the hidden, why not the secret caves of eastern Iowa? Or the towering bluffs over the Mississippi?
This is so good, Joshua! I'd bookmarked it and am just sitting down to read now. Your metaphors with academia are beautiful. We do love a good survivalist mentality in America, don't we? Perhaps the influence of religion and a Protestant work ethic, the land bringing us closer to God etc etc. And there is so much healing to be found in the wilderness... But yes, loneliness kills. That $500k is tempting but I wouldn't last two days on that show.
Ah, thanks! Yes, there must be some link between Protestant asceticism and survival stories. This all gets entwined with Eastern thought, too, in Transcendentalism and in the revival of that thinking in the 1960s. Glad it resonated with you :)
Super essay. I offer Auden (Stanza breaks won't show in comments.):
Alone
Each lover has a theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.
The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone.
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.
The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.
Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some other kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
--W.H. Auden
Hi. This was really good. “Beware the person who is sentimental or morally righteous about something that never existed, or not in the way that they think it did.” Hallelujah. Strongly identify with much of this and honestly will have to take a few scraps back into my hideyhole and maybe reflect more personally on some of your concluding statements. One small note, the Chris McCandless story and his motivations has lately been revisited in a recent episode of the Podcast Youre Wrong About. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000601953095. Worth a listen.
Thanks for reading and for the recommendation! I'll give it a listen. "Into the Wild" is endlessly fascinating to me.
Wow, this was so good.
Thanks so much!
I see a bit of myself in this piece.
My father moved the family to rural Maine because, as he said, "I was born in the wrong century," by which he meant the 18th. He wanted to retire very early to a farm, and so there we were ... living in a cabin with spring water and a wood stove. We moved to a 19th century farm house down the street a year later. A number of my friends were Back to the Landers and members of communes. My own spiritual home is a glaciated hillside where I can see for miles and the mountains in the distance ... just like that place.
On to grad school. While I saw the same brutal competition, there was less loneliness. I recall vividly how I was almost the only one of my classmates who *wasn't* coping with the stress of doctoral exams through extreme drinking. Our program had do-or-die exams that went on for days. Substance abuse was rampant. Instead, I was addicted to soccer and escaped academia to play in a Spanish-speaking league filled with day laborers. I felt more accepted there than I ever did with academic colleagues. But it's telling ... in the last few years I avoided most academics some by chance and some by design. As a first generation, working class person, I wasn't really one of them, though I didn't hold that against them ... but they certainly did against me.
Oh, my soccer nickname was "caballo."
Ah -- my Uruguayan nickname was "Oso." You must have been a tireless fútbol player.
As I wrote in response to a comment on my other site, I should have clarified that "Alone" captured the *end* of graduate school for me. I didn't find the early stages terribly stressful. Coursework was easy, teaching was fine, research went smoothly. It was the job search that nearly did me in.
It's interesting that men imagine themselves born in the wrong century far more often than women do. Based on my family history, the best time to have been born might have been the late nineteenth century. At least one generation enjoyed a real upgrade in quality of living and freedom. Before that it was nearly all serfdom, and it took most of my young adulthood to climb out of the poverty that followed those initial spikes in fortune. I have a post coming up sometime about how quickly privilege can be lost -- in a single generation. But that is not quite to your point.
The title essay in my memoir meditates on the mountaintop trope. Why do you think being "on top" in that glacial basin is so much more rewarding than being "in the thick of it," the way one must be in the Iowa prairie?
Yes, my technical skills were poor, but my speed was good and my stamina endless. When we faced a team with a particularly skilled player, sometimes I would play man defense across the entire field to both rattle them and shut them down. Sadly, I had to "retire" at 35 because being an academic took too many hours to stay in good enough shape to overcome my relative lack of foot skills. The problem occured when I only had American white guys to play against in Iowa, as typical Americans don't play football ... unless they played straight through college. Amateurs playing against collegiate+ players 10 years younger than them is just not fun.
I didn't say that being "on top" is better than being "in the thick of it." That was just the focus of the moment. You see, almost all the hills are forested, and that momentary glimpse is a rare scene among the trees. What I describe is most of New England and a good part of the eastern Mid-Atlantic. You mention prairie, but despite nearly 20 years of living in the midwest, I've never actually seen much prairie. Most of it is long gone, especially in Illinois and Iowa, as it's just endless corn fields now. I don't see much interesting unless I go to western Nebraska to the arid region in the rain shadow, or perhaps Kansas and the green sea.
Josh, the sacred is in the hidden, don't you know? It is laid bare only on the mount that defies you to claw your way up to it. I fear not the false height of the cloud! I laugh at the cyclone tantrums!
Speaking of the hidden, why not the secret caves of eastern Iowa? Or the towering bluffs over the Mississippi?
Indeed. Much was hidden in Iowa when I moved there. It is a landscape that keeps its secrets close.
Actually, much like it's people...