I came to the country because I wished to live deliberately, and thoughtfully, and with self-awareness. I wanted to hear, and bear, the worst that could be said of me. I wished to live before it was time for me to die. I did not wish to live a substitute life, a hollow life, living is so precious, I no longer wished to squander one single day. I wanted to confront the essential facts – the truth – of my life. I wished a life with no secrets so that I might live a life without fear. I wanted to embrace the natural world, and the world of animals. I wanted to write out of life, not just imagination. I wanted to be saved from a life lived in the grip of worry, money and ambition. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to make a good mark on the world and skirt on the edge of life, and reduce it to its purest and most meaningful terms. I came to find the artist buried inside of me. I came to see if I could, at long last, find the love I have sought my entire life.
– Jon Katz
“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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is do dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all of the marrow of life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Our world is so different from Thoreau’s, he is falling out of favor, as is I suppose, inevitable. More and more, say critics and professors, Thoreau is seen as a scold, a hypocrite, and a killjoy. Their students struggle to relate to him and his world. “Oh, I wouldn’t waste my time reading Thoreau,” a friend told me recently, “Emerson was the better thinker.”
I can understand that, his tone is out of kilter with our times, he was the very opposite of fast and hip and jaded and pointed. He would not have lasted an hour on Snapchat or Facebook, or grasped the awful circus that is politics in our time.
But if fear and ambition are ruining your life, he is a potent tonic for it. Fear, ambition and shame – and loneliness- were ruining my life, I was about to give up on it. I took to heart the men and women who went out into the woods to be alone and connect to the earth and think closely about how they wished to live.
People like Thoreau, Merton, Goodall.
I believe it is impossible to really know one’s self or even to understand that it means to think unless I could be alone. In our world, it is becoming almost impossible to be alone.
My passage to the country, like Thoreau’s to his pond, saved my life and shaped the rest of it. I loved reading Walden, I relate so much to Thoreau, the impatient, yearning curmudgeon. He wanted to much to live a life of meaning. I fully accept that the young will find their own Thoreau’s, they don’t need to embrace mine.
Our world moves so quickly, I see Thoreau all the time in the woods, he is ghost there, to deliberate for our world.
Like Thoreau, there was some artifice to my story.
Like Thoreau, I was never very fear from friends, food, company. But drama was not the point for me any more than it was for him. Neither of us was in danger, and voluntary loneliness is very different from the real thing. By now, everybody knows that Emerson and Thoreau’s own mother brought him food to Walden Pond regularly, he didn’t have to eat squirrels and snakes and berries all the time, he was never completely dependent on his own wits any more than I was.
He would walk easily to town.
Cynicism is a faith in our time, we all know too much too soon and too often to keep all of our hopes intact.
But he wrote so many things that came right out of my soul, and still nourish it. Thoreau wrote in Walden it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see. My writing and photography teach me the same thing. He reminded me to never look back unless I wished to go in that direction.
I never do, and I don’t. He reminded me that most men live hollow lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them. It is my intent to sing my song to the end.
I’m paying special attention to our fading garden, the last flowers of the season are hanging on with dignity and flourish, I will begin transitioning soon enough to the winter pasture, and looking for the special beauty there, and am eager to try out my infrared camera on that very special light.
Most of the gardens are fading and failing, but the Zinnia’s in our garden are still going strong. The first frost is due this week, I suspect they will be gone as well, but I still appreciate them, I will look at this photo often when winter comes.
I got a message yesterday from a man asking me why it was that I sometimes seemed to be able to get inside of the psyche of Donald Trump, and I was startled by the idea.
It’s true that I have become drawn to writing about Mr. Trump a bit lately, but I have no more insights into his motivations than anybody else who follows the news once or twice a day and have added little to the avalanche of Donald Trump scholarship.
Still, my mind got to whirring after that message, and I am drawn to Mr. Trump and his idea of bullying and cruelty, it has always seemed familiar to me.
But so much of what drives is buried deep in our unconscious and sometimes it takes a shock or a trauma to bring it up, and Donald Trump evokes both of those things for me.
Sometimes, you just need to stir your memory, and what you want will bubble up to the surface. Donald Trump has always seemed eerily familiar, and oddly disquieting, yet I have never seen him or met him. I do not generally hate the people who I disagree with, even when they are hateful.
A couple of days ago, I woke up at 4 a.m. – a time when Mr. Trump sometimes sends out those Tweets – and it hit me like a flash of blinding light:
Gerald. My Little Trump.
___
I went to a gloomy, prison-like old brick public elementary school in Providence, R.I. when I was a child, and I encountered Gerald there, he was a sixth grader (I was in fourth or fifth).
We met in the big old schoolyard. In those days, recess meant letting the kids out into a vast concrete yard while the teachers clustered near the door and smoked. The only activity was surviving.
Unless someone lay bleeding to death, we were on our own, and it was a daily carnival for the bullies and older kids, who feasted off the weak and the small.
They took our money, terrorized and insulted us, beat us up when they could. Many later became my friends and protectors, but these kids in the schoolyard were tough, bullying seemed intuitive for some of them.
The neighborhood was filled with that days’ version of immigrants, poor Jewish kids and poor Irish kids, and with all deference to the Irish, who I much admire, they did not like the Jewish kids, who they thought were strange and weak.
And it was true, we were often strange and hardly ever good fighters. That was not something our fathers and brothers taught us. We were the geeks of our day, only geeks were not powerful and wealthy then, we were just considered freaks. Young boys seem to need targets, so do many older men.
It sometimes took me hours to wend my way home through alleys and back yards to avoid the Irish kids, they loved to push my face in mud or smear dog droppings on my clothes, or chase me through the woods. Or just punch me silly.
Nobody ever asked me why my clothes were torn or why I had a black eye, and I never said. My parents knew very well that life happens.
Recess was a nightmare for us, a daily torture and humiliation. Gerald was a cartoon cut out bully, he had a genius for sensing the weakness of his victims and humiliating them publicly.
Gerald seemed offended by girls who were overweight and enraged by anyone who did not seem afraid of him. He constantly called girls “pig” or “fat piggy,” they seemed to offend him. His insults were hurtful and unrelenting.
My friends and I were especially tormented and humiliated by our helplessness.
We wanted to be heroes like the ones we read about in comics and protect the girls, but we were frightened of Gerald, no one every seemed to really challenge him and survive. No one took seriously what he did. We had no experience with fighting, none of us had any idea how to do it. And I am still ashamed to say it, but I was afraid. I learned to look the other way.
Gerald bragged relentlessly about how smart and powerful he was. He reduced helpless girls to tears, degraded them, their looks, their parents and religion in the most awful and demeaning way. He had a gift for the language of hurt. He terrorized the boys.
He would often grab one of the boys in a corner, away from the teachers, beat them bloody, tear their shirts and jackets, pull their pants down, even put a stick or rock in their rear ends while they cried. It wasn’t considered abuse them, it was called growing up. You dealt with it. Tattling was seen as a worse crime than abuse.
One brainy little nerd summoned his courage and fought back against Gerald, he was beaten black and blue, and his face was covered in blood. I thought he might die until one of the teachers broke it up. Two days later, the boy came back and punched Gerald in the face and was beaten badly again. I saw later that Gerald never forgave this boy for not being afraid of him, the idea that someone would challenge him seemed to enrage him.
But he never bothered that boy again.
It seemed to make Gerald angry and crazy in an intense way when he couldn’t intimidate people, today we say someone is “unhinged.” He could not let it go. I had no words for it then.
I also saw that for all the pain they caused, bullies were weak and vulnerable, they were broken souls themselves. They were piteous and their greatest fear was being known, and seen. That was their Achilles Heel. Sooner or later, they all fall. The world is tougher than any of them, and they hid their fear behind a wall that never came down.
I remember watching Gerald closely after he humiliated one of my friends and frightened him until he wet himself, and then shouted in front of the entire schoolyard that they should look at the crying sissy. The boy stayed him for a week. When he returned, everyone laughed at him, Gerald was the cheerleader.
Bullying was not considered a crime them, nobody cared about it, but I am certain it left some deep scars on Gerald’s targets.
By then, the writer was emerging in me.
I was already writing letters to the editor of the Providence Journal and reading every Hardy Boy book I could find. I was flirting with the idea that words were more powerful than fists and swords. I kept reading that, but rarely saw it.
I was weird enough to be an occasional target of Gerald but wily enough to stay well out of his way most of the time. I could hide anywhere, even in a crowded room. He did beat me up a few times, take my lunch money and shouted at me that I was a sissy and scrawny “Jew-boy.”
One teacher overheard him shouting this and asked me if that was what he said.
He denied it, absolutely. I said I didn’t hear anything. I knew she wouldn’t be out in the school yard the next day.
Gerald was an amazing liar, he seemed to lie almost effortlessly and with great conviction, I remember thinking that he had his own idea of what was real (he lived in his own reality, as we say now.) I couldn’t believe anyone could lie as often as he did and get away with it, but most people seemed to look the other way.
And I came to realize that, for whatever reason, he had no idea what the truth was.
One of Gerald’s sisters told a friend of mine that his father was a mean drunk, and Gerald was often treated at home just the way he treated us in the schoolyard. There, it was his turn to be terrified.
One day, a sister of one of the girls he had tormented came into the school yard and walked up to Gerald and spit in his face and said if he ever bothered her sister she would kill him, and Gerald called her some ugly name I forget, and she took her lunch box and swung in an arc and slammed it in his crotch, and Gerald squealed like a pig and dropped to the ground. He cried, threw up, and wet his pants.
The sister – she was from Ireland, she said, and in Ireland, nobody messed with your brother or sister and got away with it – opened her lunch box and dropped a pile of rocks and sand on Gerald’s tear-stained face. A teacher came running over, and the girl said “I did this,” and marched proudly off to the principal office. She had to stay after school for a week or so and write “I don’t beat other students up” 500 times.
I learned a lot about women that day.
Gerald was never the same after that, he still insulted people and bellowed and postured, but getting shown up by a tall skinny girl like that just seemed to crush his spirit. He never seemed or felt very menacing after that. We learned, I think, that all bullies can be undone, their undoing comes from their broken souls, not from the outside world. You just have to outlast them, they will eventually break into pieces.
The Irish girl knew how to bring him down, she knew how a bully was made. She knew they are not strong, but the weakest among us.
No whole person does that to other people.
I learned to hate bullies, and to hate myself whenever I failed to confront them. I learned that most people look the other way at bullies, we all wait for someone else to come along and stop them. Sometimes, people do.
I fell in love with this warrior girl, but she had a boyfriend and would have nothing to do with a squirt like me.
I never did really stand up to Gerald, but he did inspire some strength and daring in me. I had my older sister write a letter I dictated calling our Principal, Miss McCarthy – she was tough as nails – a fat pig and stupid cow – and I went into the closet room and found Gerald’s school bag and stuck the letter inside of an assignment he had written for class.
He was called into the principal’s office the next day and skipped recess for two weeks. I also picked up some frozen dog droppings, wrapped them in a newspaper and put them in his lunch box when I got to school.
All of our lunchboxes were placed above our coats in the coat room.
I learned that you can’t fight bullies on their terms, you have to define your own.
I think he threw up when he opened it, I wasn’t there but I heard about it.
I suppose this is why I am sometimes drawn to write about Mr. Trump. And his psyche.
In the dark barn in the early morning of a chilly, cloudy day, the infrared camera tells another story, the hidden life of a hay bale, suffused with energy and light, it shows us the brightness and power of the hay bale, which will soon be sustaining our animals in the cold.
