Prospective/ Retrospective

Printed on the shower curtain in my bathroom is a map of the world. The lines are drawn with a loose hand and the countries are playfully colored. Greenland’s green, Uganda’s peach, its neighbor Tanzania is pink, and the great swath of Russia is a dreamy blue—adding some cheer to the otherwise destitute tiled walls. My bathroom, with its leaky faucet and the closest thing to counter-space the top of the toilet bowl tank, is not the most charming feature of the small Fort Greene apartment, my home of four years.

But so long as I’ve lived in New York, my home has never been more than a place to sleep at night, and I am aware that many people put up with worse.  For beyond the secluded hull of every apartment lies the magnificent cosmos of the city, the broad barreling avenues, the perennial clamor, the daily business with its unremitting bustle. It becomes difficult to see how anything could really be happening anywhere else, and if it is, certainly not so with such sordid splendor as here. The rest of the world, in a word, disappears.

And so I needed the shower curtain map to protect me from that insularity, to remind me that there is more than just the City. I used to study the names and contours of countries while I brushed my teeth, but its comic quality made them seem less real and it was not long, as with most everything under the glare of the New York skyline, that the colors began to fade into the sunset of familiarity.

Sometime last winter, during the dreariest days of the year when the snow had lost its sheen, the map again caught my eye. It was then that I knew the winter would be my last, that the saga of rolling city days and nights, punctuated by brief blinking frenetic weekends, would come to a close. A great burden like a full-bellied yawn was lifted. I began to craft my exit plan and after some months of tinkering, these travels and my blog were the result.

As a personal account of my travels and a space for reflection, I think it befitting to begin with why, as far as I can tell, I am going. It may come as no surprise that this is not the first question posed to me when I speak of my plan. And one would be right to object that there is no easy rationale for such a drastic decision and that any discussion may seem superfluous since you either get it or you never will. It is the same as that which runs through your veins or it is inconceivable nonsense, remedied with short and righteous judgment. For my part, the impulse to go has for many years persisted without a need for justification and so the reasons have remained self-evident, if inarticulate, and the only question was whether I would some day summon the courage to leave what I know for that great beyond.

Let me first say that things look very different from the edge of the abyss. The reasons are no longer clear-cut. My thinking is muddled. I can’t help wondering if there’s been some oversight, if perhaps I may have benefited from asking the questions when their determinations would have made a difference.
But I do know that this is the first choice I ever really made. Up until now my life was preconceived. Expectations were set—by my parents, by myself, by society—and I met them with few aberrations, no more than “normal” adolescent deviance allows. Selecting a university, choosing a course of academic study, even after graduation, searching for and getting a “real job” in the “real world”—all of these found me as much as I found them. If I was ever unsure of the next step, I needed only to ask, or to look around and see what the others were doing. And so my life continued with a simple logic. But I could also look ahead and see down the simple path along which the simple logic leads, and that view was unsatisfying to me.

Thus came my choice and everything it entails. There is no “how-to” guide for what I’m doing, no one but myself to lead the way. Here is a case of total decision and total responsibility: hence, as Sartre forewarned, the nausea.

So what of the others? Many of the people I speak to about my plan to travel empathize with the impulse immediately and lament, always with some wistful flare, that they are not in a position to do what I’m doing or that their opportunity has already passed. They bypass the choice, and so the choice is made for them. It is clear to me why they shrink from this particular inner-voice when so many other voices are making other demands. It is frightening to respond to such a calling, and yet the alternative is equally scary. Most people, I think, find it easier to block out the voices altogether. They do what is easiest, which is to justify the safe way. Doing what is easiest is precisely the problem.

I once asked a young woman what she wanted from life and her short thoughtful response was “comfort and a challenge.” To be sure, these desirables—comfort and a challenge—sound like they’d make a sweet duet, but in fact they work about as well together as would Stravinsky and Kenny G. With some reflection, one will see that their natures conflict and that comfort, though greedily pursued, is to a degree dispensable, while the essential role of strife—in that “dissonance brings growth”—is increasingly clear.

Over the years I have developed a distaste for certain comforts; I find life in my comfort zone under-stimulating and that under-stimulation to be oppressive. (It follows that thinking, too, a fundamentally uncomfortable process, must be encouraged from an early age, a shortcoming of our current era.) One must grow to love the strain, more, to live for the surge against one’s own limitations. Taking risks is never comfortable, but the yield can be great, and it is the only way to live close to the flame. Maybe it’s the American can-do optimism or the Jewish qualities of faith and perseverance, but I’ve never been too concerned about getting burned and I will myself to turn setbacks into further challenges.

I think it is fear above all, cloaked in rationalization, that prevents people from changing their lives and choosing the predictable path over a foray into the unknown. The great Spinoza, as he embarked on a journey of the spirit, encounters the same dilemma and, with a logician’s twist, comments thus: “I seemed set on losing a certain good for the sake of an uncertain good. But after a little reflection, I first of all realized that if I abandoned the old ways and embarked on a new way of life, I should be abandoning a good that was by its very nature uncertain [Spinoza is speaking of wealth, honor and sensuous pleasure] in favor of one that was uncertain not of its own nature (for I was seeking a permanent good) but only in respect of its attainment.” The response is quick-witted but we’re not satisfied. We moderns are too savvy to believe in choices that are black and white. So we dismiss countless formulations of the search for the good life as either bridled by superficial dichotomies—in this case, low hedonistic enterprise versus  the transcendental—or else linger when they don’t say enough.

Of the latter type, and prominent in the minds of Americans, is Thoreau’s famous statement: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The active principle—the need to live with urgency and to feel intensely alive—is what first brought me to New York and now the reason I must leave it. It is perhaps the strangest and most striking phenomenological quality of this city that Life is visible and ubiquitous but that one is left constantly striving toward its attainment. After the initial pleasure cruise, during which New York seems to live up in every way to its legend, one finally discovers that Life is rarely more than a promise, at the corner, the next pub, the weekend coming. New York only feeds one enough to stay put, and in the long run not enough to validate something as remote from Life as the office or demeaning employment to which people subject themselves in order to stay.

I do not mean to say that New York is unlivable. One may settle down in this city and through concerted effort and for brief periods salvage some semblance of the Good Life (and it is my conviction that everyone ought to spend at least a couple years here to really see it, to be in it and of it) but ultimately, if one was not born in the city, it is impossible to truly lay down roots, and careful reflection will prove that each year’s crop, insofar as we are speaking strictly of the city, is one of diminishing returns. Thus, as Thoreau once set out in search of fertile soil, I too must leave my lot behind.

Of course, I’m not leaving to the woods. Thoreau is much more radical in his command to Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!, to whittle one’s way down to essences. His monkish withdrawal from the company of others I find too essentialized and no longer among the “facts of life.” My guess is that it was partly his longing for an impossibly virtuous life that made him stray from society, to seek the straight and narrow in the simplicity of solitude. But except for the rare misanthrope, connection figures large as a component of any life worth living (and Thoreau, remember, comes back from the woods). It is one of life’s inevitable tragedies that we are fated to act, again and again, from a place of ignorance, not knowing how to prevent our actions from unwittingly hurting others, as they often do.

That said—and this is the simplest answer to why I am going—I wish to study first-hand the art of the good life (I also expect to participate at times in the not-so-good life). To this end, I am leaving my home and going out to see how people all over the world live out their lives, to see if I can’t find some meaning in it for myself and to carry that meaning home with me. Home, I think, is the place where that most essential part of yourself is given fullest expression. And just as there are many ways to travel, so there are as many homes to discover. I set out on this journey so that it may bring me home again, in ways I never could have expected and not before I have turned for some time to the lessons this great world has to teach: the wisdom of the ancient religions; the walks of the old cities; the Lebanese bank-teller torn from his family by civil strife and the mountain farmer in rural Tibet; the people in the places where civilization began and the people for whom civilization has hardly started. Life is that map of the world, full of color and wild possibility, but sitting, waiting in a dingy apartment for someone to take notice, to answer its call. And the good life is the beginning of that conversation.

Citations:

Original article is here - http://eggbangtheory.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/prospectiveretrospective/