Liberal Arts in the Woods

A fresh crop of undergraduates has matriculated at my alma mater, and for the past two weeks I guided a group of eight of them through an intensive transitional program set in the beautiful northern woods of Wisconsin. Eight bright-eyed dudes, laden with books and rumors of books and myriad anxieties, scrambling up a 12-ft wall under the benevolent gaze of me, their bearded leader, silently cheering for them.

We ate meatball subs and debated the proper shape of Christian witness in politics under canoes lashed to the ceiling of the dining hall. We pondered the unfathomable depths of the love of God on a pontoon boat, which 20 minutes of effort helped to anchor in the shallows near the lake's bank under a patchwork cover of pine tree shade. We talked about community sitting cross-legged in cool dirt, stood up to brush off our behinds and hike back to camp. As campfire smoke filled our jackets and fleeces we talked Dostoevsky, transubstantiation, metaphysics, and dating. I commented on academic paper formats and the school's language requirements while picking marshmallow out of my beard.

I helped to build the cabin they slept in. We built it lincoln-log style from some kind of kit one year when I went north for spring break to read and work. During the long winters, the snow muffles everything but the sound of the wind across the frozen lake. It is possible to build a fire in the middle of the ice, a couple hundred feet from the nearest shore. Standing in its glow, looking at a darkening forest above the buried banks while the sun goes down, it can feel as though you've reached the edge of the world—where eternity clips time, as Annie Dillard says.

In late summer, the sounds never stop. Bugs and outboard motors, shouts, rifle retorts, backfires, fireworks, campfire crackles, leaves rattling like a cascade of rice across a counter, deer suddenly bounding through the woods in front of you, birdcalls. It all floats on a light wind, the organic counterpoint to the mechanical city hum I've become accustomed to.

We walked over acres of forest and grass, turning over ideas and perspectives in the workshops of our souls and burning off extra energy in a steady chatter. Hymns sung next to a sputtering Hobart lifted the dishwashing room into the celestial spheres. Our puckered hands slung food waste and scrubbed baking sheets. The damp that spread through aprons into t-shirts was holy water. We may as well have been wearing robes and tonsures. God smiled upon us, likely in amusement.

Of course, you have to come back to earth sometime. Those students are about to begin their freshman year; our wonderful faculty advisor is already busy advising his new advisees. The engine is about to turn, and within a few weeks, Wisconsin will likely seem distant in history. That doesn't matter, though. What happened will prove its relative value over time. I'm just glad to have been a part of it, whatever it will mean in the long term. Embodied, thinking creatures that we are, I don't know of a better place to start a liberal arts education than in the woods along the banks of Long Lake.

Steaks on a Plane

"Excuse me, sir, could I please see your boarding pass?"

I looked up from my laptop, instinctively tightening my feet around my bag and placing a hand on my rollaway. A woman in my airline's uniform with disarmingly large Persian eyes stood waiting for my response.

"Um, yeah sure, just a sec."

I handed it to her out of my shirt pocket, and waited to be told that I would need to go back to American Customs Pre-Clearance to sort out the ambiguities I'd inadvertently penned into my information card.

She eyed my ticket. "Please bear with me for a moment, sir." Then she walked away. I closed my computer, watched the desk under the sign for GATE 105, and thought about what a great story I'd have if I were detained in Dublin for the whole weekend by customs agents perplexed by my inconsistent passport use on flights to and from the US.

I ended up with a different story, however. My flight attendant returned and looked at me with her huge eyes. "Sorry about the confusion, sir. You'd gotten an upgrade and we wanted to make sure it was printed on your ticket." She handed me my boarding pass and I looked at it, then back up at her. "Wait a second—I'm sorry, what does this mean?" I must have misunderstood the word printed in place of "Economy" in the lower right corner, next to the almost-certainly misprinted "SEAT 3G". She replied, "It means you are now flying business class." She turned on her heel and walked away.  I smiled, caught myself, furrowed my brow, and smiled again, unable to bury my excitement.

So it begins: the story of a wide-eyed midwestern boy's adventure behind the business class curtain. 

Monetary Policy and Maturity

Fifty euros can buy two or three heavy bags of basmati rice, a new book, a pair of used books, a set of utensils, some chipped dishes, a derelict couch, a stolen bike, fries for a month, a new shirt, a trash can, a nice comforter, a cheap pair of shoes, postage for a package that can't leave the continent, postage for a three letters that can, assorted groceries for two weeks, a rice cooker, or student health insurance for ten months.

Fifty euros and eleven US dollars: this is the total amount of legal tender in my possession. I'm leaning towards the rice cooker, and perhaps, after a special dispensation of grace, I will be able to send my letters; beautiful missives addressed to National Education, Nelnet, and my other lender, requesting that my loan repayments be put on hold without incurring the penalties I probably deserve for "doing it wrong."

At the end of the day, I love my life and the season my life is entering. The various forces at work on me and my roommates in the last two weeks have pushed each of us right up to the existing boundaries of our virtues (although perhaps I speak too quickly for Jeremy and Dan). A sort of alienating friction complicates our daily doings, but it seems to force me, at least, out of my insecurity and passivity—who has time for insecurity or passivity when sleeping under a roof at night is an open question in the afternoon, or when you need to immediately procure information about a ticket for the last train home when the information is not available in English?—and this alone seems to me to suggest a certain trajectory of development for the upcoming year: one that pulls personal identity out of abstraction, uncertainty, and the infinity of possible choices, and instead gives it a tiny but definite existence.

At the risk of sounding like an idiot (give me a break, I'm exhausted from traveling), I mean something like a sense of self that is not valued in itself (e.g. as "material" for creating autobiographical art) and that naturally resists prolonged, morbid introspection, a sense of self that instead manifests in a particular perspective through which to look out, and a peculiar voice with which to say what it is that you see. Seems pretty adult, something that people who have it don't think about, or think about thinking about, because they're too busy being human beings or something. It's assumed, not sought after, and in some ways perhaps it represents a mutual understanding between yourself and the impersonal world you are trying to navigate, which will not give you any extra time to deal with your personal issues because it moves unremittingly, without concern for its inhabitants. Of course, I mean only the natural world, but anyway.

I am pleased to report that we have metal utensils now, and two glasses. The third one broke on Jeremy's hand when he tried to wash it; a sheet of paper towel helped to stop the bleeding in lieu of a bandaid or cloth bandage. When we first got back from the second-hand store there had magically appeared a new desk in our apartment, and someone had also slid a letter under the door. It's as though we really live here or something! So I think to myself as I look out the window towards the distant spires of the old city hall, a building that has cast a shadow over the cobblestone square below it for centuries and centuries.