As I sit here at my writing desk I look across my little room and see about two dozen journals on the shelf, in all manner of shape and size, going back many years. Tucked away behind the shelf in storage boxes are yellow pads–the journals of my youth–dozens of them. Back then, thirty years ago and more, I wrote with a pencil and now the oldest pages are hardly discernible. I get a sense of comfort looking at those lost words, marks fading like a language disappearing. I wonder why, after all the words and years of record keeping their disappearance gives me satisfaction? That is obviously at odds with the nature of making a record.

I recently read a short biography of René Descartes. It’s in the book I’m currently reading, Examined Lives by James Miller. Descartes kept a journal at his side at all times. He gave it the name Olympia. He sought a quiet life and often lived like a fugitive, going from place to place, in an effort to escape his fame and pursue his thought-filled solitude. After moving to the Netherlands he wrote in his journal: “I have been able to lead a life as solitary and withdrawn as if I were in the most remote desert.”

I used to be obsessed with leaving evidence of my existence. That was part of what was behind the journals. That obsession, thankfully, no longer haunts me. To the contrary, I am hard at pursuing a course of singular autonomy which seems a lighter and looser obsession. Certainly it does not haunt me. The autonomy I seek feels the antithesis of my previous obsession, a sort of independence of history. But maybe that is just a hopeful imagination at work.

Here is a verse from a poem by Barton Sutter that captures the nuance of what I’m trying to convey. The poem is called TheThousand-foot Ore Boat.

To live until we die–

The job seems just impossible.

The great weight of the past

Pushing us forward, the long future

Thrust out before us, so little room to either side!

The autonomy I suggest is freedom from the weight of the past while avoiding the rush to the future. There is little about modern life that affords this notion of freedom. Perhaps that is the hook of my attention, being a simplistic contrarian. Regardless, one of the (few) benefits of maturation is coming to accept the inconsistencies of (my) life.

_____________________

Just as a note: the words “singular autonomy,” used above, were pulled from my current notebook. The one with the thick pages. As a rebellious exercise against Cartesian methodology I choose not to give it a name.

First, while writing this blog (God, I hate that word, blog, it is ugly, overused and common.) I paid more attention–more attention to life, to nature, to the books I was reading and the thoughts that were coursing through my pointy little head.

Secondly, and obviously, the discipline of the writing kept me on a course, albeit a meandering course, of discovery. It was an outlet, a place to exercise a notion or two about whatever was going on at the moment. Without that discipline I’m more inclined to glide along like the dumb-ass mother nature made of me. (Who cannot resist the temptation for self-improvement?)

Too, I quit the writing here because I wanted to save up the writing energy for other projects. That still concerns me, there being only so much time and energy in a day. The net effect, however, seems that the other writing comes and goes regardless of what I do here–or don’t do.

Lastly, I missed the little community of this place. We were a nice group, good-looking enough, demographically all over the board, a hearty group with brio and a penchant for interesting conversation. That community, whether real or virtual, served up a sense of place and I miss that.

So, here goes, gonna give it another go.

__________________________

One of the things I’ve learned during this hiatus is the value of an understood purpose. That is, as it pertains to this journal, having a surer path, a sense of definition. What’s it about? And for you, dear reader, whiling away a fraction of your finite mortality here, why visit this place?

The answer lies in a question, my personal BIG question, the one I’ve been asking myself since my eighth birthday (I’ll share that story in a future posting): How should I live my life?

The lesser question is: what are the themes and vehicles with which to tackle the big question? (Remember Socrates’s observation that the unexamined life is not worth living? Well, how does one do that? How do you examine a life such as to make it more worthy?)

It boils down to a small handful of themes and that’s the stuff I want to spend time on here:

• Reading and writing
• Nature and the out-of-doors
• Groundbreakers: Thinkers, troublemakers & adventurers

(Thank you, Susan. Your comments this past week made all this jell. (If you’ve ever wondered: Is it jell or gell, check here.))

Okay, that’s all for now. Stay tuned. And thanks for reading!

Happy trails!

Reprinted without permission:
TWITTER ON CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

~ Posted by Tim de LIsle, December 16th 2011

By their tweets shall ye know them. The death of Christopher Hitchens, the polemicist and boulevardier, came not as a shock, but still as a blow to many, and thousands of them were moved to comment on Twitter. Some just said they were sad, a fine sentiment but a fairly pointless one to broadcast to the world, because it’s not about you—it’s a lot sadder for family and close friends—and there’s not much point grabbing people by the lapels if you don’t have anything to say. Happily, many tweeters pushed themselves harder. Here’s a snapshot of some of the different approaches; tallies of followers have been trimmed to the nearest round number.

Salman Rushdie (150,000 followers) struck a note seldom heard on Twitter—the epic.

Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops. Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011.

That line was widely quoted, and given prominence by the BBC. Among those who saw it there was the biographer and Intelligent Life contributing editor Julie Kavanagh, a friend of Hitchens, who said it was “the only time I’ve been moved to tears by a tweet”.

Richard Dawkins (283,000 followers), who has an interview with Hitchens in his role as guest editor of this week’s New Statesman, went for epic with added polemic:

Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants including God.

Tony Parsons (20,000 followers), the columnist and novelist, told a story:

Memory of Christopher Hitchens. 20 years ago—a live TV debate. Never saw anyone drunker in a green room. Never saw anyone sharper on air.

Matthew Sweet (2,000 followers), the BBC Radio 3 presenter and Intelligent Life regular, had a crisp vignette:

My #Hitch moment: singing a song about Tom Paine with him to the tune of God Save the Queen. He had a deep whisky & cigarettes bass.

At a moment like this, you see the importance of tone. Richard Bacon (1.37m followers), the BBC DJ, found the acceptable face of the “I’m sad” school of thought:

Oh bugger. Christopher Hitchens has died.

He was echoed by the young rock band Wild Beasts (13,000 followers), who were matey but sharp:

Christopher Hitchens, you old contrarian, RIP, in anywhere but heaven.

Violet Towers (400 followers), a probation officer who writes under a pseudonym, quoted Hitchens himself, elegantly:

“The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”—Christopher Hitchens

The devout faced a dilemma: to chide or not to chide. One of them published a vindictive line about Hitchens and hell which is too dismal to quote in full. Another, the journalist Cristina Odone (700 followers), struck a happier note, as well as finding room for a gerund:

RIP #ChrisHitchens For 40 years being a journalist meant trying to be like the #Hitch. He’d laugh at my praying for him, but I will

Sterling Sunley, a book-lover from Vancouver (0 followers—quite a feat), gently upbraided some of the duller tweeters around him:

The person I would most like to hear about the legacy of Christopher Hitchens is Hitch himself; he would suffer no false sentiments.

Stephen Fry (3.5m followers), the actor, writer and British national treasure, marked the gravity of the occasion by restricting himself to only two adjectives, and going big on verbs instead:

Goodbye, Christopher Hitchens. You were envied, feared, adored, reviled and loved. Never ignored. Never bested. A great and marvellous man

There was plenty of warmth, but not much wit. Almighty God (27,000 followers)— one of several characters of that name on Twitter—did His best to fill the breach:

In honor of Christopher Hitchens I will admit it just this once: I Am Not Great.

while the writer Lisa Appignanesi (800 followers) found humour in the obituary on the Guardian site:

Laughing while reading an obit is an event only #Hitch makes possible

Someone said Hitchens had a God-given talent for writing—that might have really irritated him. And so might the fact that the tributes were joined by Piers Morgan, a journalist of a very different stripe. But in the best of these tweets, you could see what Hitchens himself stood for: vision, spark, the power of the word.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life

I have below pasted the reading list for 2012. It is interesting to compare the years. This year I read twenty-seven books, not counting the current book which I will finish before year’s end. In comparison to last year, 27 is less by a full 16%. And last year included one thousand page beast, Infinite Jest. No thousand pagers this year.  The really interesting comparison is to 2009, the list I wrote about in The Millions. This year by comparison is less 2009 by 27%. That is to say that in three years my reading pace has dropped by 25%. (Too, that year included two books over a thousand pages, Bolaño’s 2666 and Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.) A quick calculation brings me to the conclusion that at this pace in about five years I will have stopped reading altogether.

Speaking of reading lists. Are you aware of Art Garfunkle’s? He’s a serious reader who has been keeping tally of books read since the 1960s. Here’s a link. To really drive it home, he goes another step to list his favorite books. Browsing through his list is almost as good as studying the library of a dinner host. (Which beats looking into their medicine cabinet any day.)

Here’s my list of books read in 2011. (I’ve linked the books I reviewed.)

• Jan 7    Bound to Last, 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book — Sean Manning, Ed.
• Jan 8   The Maine Woods — H.D. Thoreau
• Jan 24   A Widow’s Tale — Joyce Carol Oats
• Feb 19   Portrait of a Marriage — Sándor Márai
• Feb 28   The Foremost Good Fortune — Susan Conley
• Mar 5    Moby Dick — Herman Melville (This was a third reading.)
• Mar 21   The Sweet Relief of Missing Children — Sarah Braunstein
• Mar 28   Tinkers — Paul Harding
•  Apr 5    Seeds — Richard Horan
• Apr 25   Fire Season — Phillip Connors
• Apr 30   The Pale King — David Foster Wallace
• May 7    The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers — H. Cartier-Bresson
• May 15   The Ongoing Moment — Geoff Dyer
• May 30  The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore — Benjamin Hale
• Jun 15    Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — David Lipsky
• Jun 21    The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  — Gertrude Stein
• Jul 10     The Tao of Travel — Paul Theroux
• Aug 3     Feathers — Thor Hanson
• Aug 15   The Surf Guru — Doug Dorst
• Aug 20  The Story of Charlotte’s Web — Michael Sims
• Oct 1      Disaster was my God — Bruce Duffy
• Oct 20   The Great Leader — Jim Harrison
• Nov 3     Blue Nights — Joan Didion
• Nov 9     Beautiful & Pointless — David Orr
• Nov 19   Swimming to Antarctica — Lynne Cox
• Nov 29  The Triggering Town — Richard Hugo

Two last notes, should lists be your thing. Here are two that I’ve studied for years. The first is the reading list of St. Johns College in Annapolis, MD. St. Johns is better known as the Great Books School. The entire college education at St. Johns is based on the readings of original texts. Here is the undergrad reading list. It’s heavy duty. A little lighter and less intimidating is the Modern Library list of 100 best: Nonfiction & Fiction. One could do worse than read a few of these.

But Fitschen’s observation is more than that. I’ve spent a great deal of time in my head over the years, though largely with the guides (books) Wittgenstein recommends eschewing. Now at this place in life, I am beginning to question the value of all that quiet time, all that contemplation. If you’ve been following this blog the past year or two you might have noticed a shift from–with a nod to Guy Davenport–”The Geography of the Imagination,” to “The Geography Under My Feet, My Sleeping Bag, My Canoe.” Fitchen, citing Wittgenstein, gives weight to replacing the cerebral with the physical. I’m reminded of another mountain climber, Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest (1963). “I don’t reflect much,” said Whittaker. “I just do it.” (Nike, by the way, rolled out their “Just Do It” campaign in 1988.) A life of action versus a life of the mind, interior monologue, exterior dialogue–a classic lineup.

I’ve never been one to sit around. There is enough ADD in my temperament to keep me in motion. That has always been the case, but it seems to be picking up momentum and along with it the need to practice the peripatetic theory of knowledge. I think a sense of place has a great deal to do with it. Maine, if one is inclined, invites one to get lost, literally and figuratively. It is a place that will draw on the physical, if one is naturally inclined in that direction. The more I explore this place, the more I am dismayed over  my abysmal knowledge of my surroundings. For instance, I plucked a small twig from a tree this morning. There are five or six alternating simple leaves attached. But I cannot identify the tree from this sample, despite my library of guide books. It is a glaring omission in my accumulated knowledge, this simple business of not knowing my surroundings. I can talk with a modicum of intelligence, say, about the life and thought of Nietzsche but I cannot tell you anything about a tree at the dog park. This is deeply troubling to me and I am setting out to rectify it.

The quote is from my favorite living American author, Jim Harrison. It’s from his new novel, The Great Leader. (My review can be found here.)

I was deep in the lake region of Patagonia, maybe five, six years ago, I don’t remember. (Time and space, especially time, escapes me.) I met George, from France, the village of Joan, of the Arc fame. He’d come, as had I, to chase the brown trout that were big deep in the ice rivers of the Andes, the Futalafu and other rivers. Huge trout, weighed, not measured. (Not fifteen inches but six pounds. And more.) Blue green rivers, fresh out of the mountains. One thing leading to another and I discover George is a reader. “Who is your favorite writer,” I ask. “Jim Harrison,” he responds. I jump–yes, jump–”Mine too,” I exclaim. “He is,” George says, “the only writer who combines the life of the mind and the life of action.” Leave it to the French.

But, the point being the quote: What is it that makes a man (me)  what to go further and farther away to the place people largely ignore? Is there a place where a person can hide? Escape? Evaporate? It will happen soon enough, given a few years, or less, and a person, all of us, will be extinct. Gone. Vanished. Dead.  And we will be so very dead as to not even know it. So why rush to the place that is largely ignored, either specifically or, in a more surreptitious manner, figuratively? Can’t answer that. There comes a time, as Hemingway observed, when we (might)  decide to sprint to the finish line. He did. Don’t think I want to sprint. I’m more of an endurance guy, taking my time. But the destination is the same, all together the same.

They say a society is not a civilization until the poets arrive. I believe that. I hold my lantern to the darkness, at the foot of the citadel, outside the drawn gate, alone, peering into the darkness, looking, waiting. Where are the poets? Where is the civilization? Will they arrive before the extinction?

There is much to be said about the quiet of remote waters, the call of the loon, the slip of a paddle into the mercury of morning water. There is a contemplative mediation to moving a boat with one’s own power. It is a fashion of being on the water unlike any other. Sailing comes closest, I suspect, but that is an obvious harnessing of power beyond shoulder and back. At the end of a day paddling there is nothing left but reflection.

I asked Tim what stood out most about his hiking adventure on the AT. “Freedom,” he responded without hesitation. “Every day I had the freedom to walk as far as I wanted, the freedom to camp by a brook I liked, the freedom to stop when and where I chose.” It was a simple as that. He continued, “I had everything I needed, nothing more nothing less. And every morning I got up and put on my pack and set out, completely free.”

Sunset, Aziscoho Lake

]]> http://thehouseilivein.me/2011/09/24/freedom/feed/ 2 dougbruns Sunset, Aziscoho Lake http://thehouseilivein.me/2011/08/26/away-from-heald-pond/ http://thehouseilivein.me/2011/08/26/away-from-heald-pond/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 17:56:12 +0000 Doug Bruns http://thehouseilivein.me/?p=1405 ]]> I walked out of Maine’s North woods last week after hiking into Heald Pond. A few days later I realized that I had, at that point, likely been more alone than I had ever previously been alone. Alone in the physical sense. That is, I was physically removed from another human being by a distance of significance. It was a few miles at least, this measure of significance, probably more than a few, whatever a few is by definition. Regardless, it was apparent that I had been in a place, literally and figuratively, that I had never appreciated previously.

I’ve been to some remote places, mountains in South America and Asia, afloat in the Indian Ocean, places where if I got into a pinch, it would take some effort to get out of trouble. But I was always with others. There were people around, fishermen, climbers, photographers, adventurers. But at little Heald Pond there was no one. Just my dog Lucy and countless moose.

Being alone and removed from civilization isn’t so much about how to get help if you get into a pickle. If you let that concern get into your head you might as well stay home on the couch. For me rather, it is not about the risk, but the benefit of the experience. Snowbound in the mountains, the American thinker Eric Hoffer read the essays of Montaigne, leading him to conclude, “With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves.” I appreciate the effect Montaigne would have on a man stuck in the mountains for a winter. But the notion gives me pause and I am unsure about Hoffers’ conclusion –aloneness as a vehicle to escaping oneself(?)

I experience a magnetic pull to the wilderness. I always have. Despite years of domestication–perhaps due to years of domestication!–I seem more susceptible to true north than ever. I don’t believe it to be a consequence of trying to escape myself, to acknowledge Hoffer’s observation. Rather, I think it more Thoreauvian, more an effort to confront life intensely. On the surface of things, those seem two competing notions. Upon reflection, though, for some of us it is perhaps necessary to escape one’s self in order to drive life into a corner and measure its true account.

Regardless of the motivation, I sense a singular truth to being alone in the woods. My mission at this stage of life, is not so much to understand such a thing; rather, to be simply aware of it. It should not take two or three days after the fact to sink in. To be present is the great motivation.

N 45° 36’35.80/W 70° 21′ 50.09

Above: Coordinates for Eagle Pond and Horseshoe Pond respectively.

I was humbled by the North Woods last month. The Audubon Society and Trout Unlimited put a call out to members interested in volunteering for a study of remote ponds in Northern Maine which might hold native brook trout. It is estimated that 97 percent of all native brookies resident in the lower 48 live in the state of Maine. But no one knows for certain. One way to find out is to fish the ponds and lakes which have never been stocked. Hence the call to anglers comfortable in the backwoods. I raised my hand, packed my gear, loaded my dog into the Escape and headed north to Jackman, a lumber outpost a dozen or so miles shy of the Canadian border.

I did not leave home leave without committing the Google maps of my ponds to memory, not without my compass and a quick brush up of orienteering skills. I used to be pretty good with a map and compass. No more. Of the five ponds I was to survey, I could not deliver myself to a single one. I knew where I wanted to go, but I could not get there, which feels like a metaphor for (my) life. Apt metaphors aside, I found the woods impenetrably thick. The deeper I got into them, the less likely I was heading in the right direction and the more concerned I grew about getting out. Frankly, I bailed. Me and Lucy, tails between our legs, came home humbled.

The difference between pride and humiliation is a matter of a few degrees. Where I was proud of back country skills, I was handed up a meaty dish of humiliation. But that was then. Modern technology has a solution and I embrace it wholeheartedly. I now own a Delorme PN-60 GPS, loaded with the lastest topo map and, most importantly, keyed with the coordinates to my assigned ponds. No matter how deep I crawl into those wonderful 27,000 square miles we call the The Great North Woods, I should find my waters–and my way out! Old school be damned. Maps and compass are so very yesterday. So next week I’m off , as Twain said, to parts unknown, seeking redemption and tight lines.