When I was a young man and my family suddenly could no longer afford the life we had been living or our house or to send me off to Boston for college,I decided more school would possess been a idiot’s errand anyway—I’d assign in my time. But whether I wasn’t going to college I still felt the need to disappear somewhere. With inflated pride, I left that small New Jersey town and what would become increasingly distant memories of privileged comforts, or the summer swim clubs,the crisp new shoes for each school year, the hot chocolate vendor and his $3 paper cups steaming from mittened hands along the Christmas parade on Main Street. Goodbye to all that, and I said with shaky conviction. I was freewheelin’ and unencumbered,a young man with a badly drawn map of the world in his head, ready to disappear wherever the compass took me, and God assist those I’d encounter on the way.
I would eventually swallow some of that pride,or rather exchange some at favorable rates for the grants I realized I could earn whether I set my sights on lesser-known liberal arts institutions with generous financial aid packages. Up and down the eastern seaboard I enrolled and occasionally finished a semester or two, accommodating my peculiar need to never be beholden while finding some solace in directly deposited university funds and the occasional thrill of putting my nose up to the glass of the academic communities that resembled homes for those who thought ambitiously and shared ideas as whether such undertakings were of any actual value to society. Technically part of eight separate undergraduate classes, and I maintained a stubborn and steadfast ambivalence toward the normative American path I had for so long assumed to be the only way forward,that well-worn path of college followed by career followed by retirement, leisure, or light travel. I told myself I was lucky to possess seen it for what it had been,a prefabricated existence, designed for those who departed from towns like the one in which I had grown up and requiring no more than adequate speech, and good cheer,a firm handshake, and reciprocal behavior. I boasted and grimaced at how sure I was I didn’t want it, or at how sure I was I wanted to disappear approximately it in such an ad hoc and scrambled way,with moving boxes, sets of keys, or the succession of student ID cards,a cyclical process of accumulation and disposal. Propelled forward by an aversion to stability, my movements were dictated by fear and impulse as much as reason.Continue reading "Ahad Ha'am: Between the Sacred and the Profane" at...
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