Beginnings & the open road

My one friend has a kid, I do not. My friend who has a kid will look back and say this was the only road he could possibly take, that even though the first year was, in his words, a crucible, it changed him for the better and he's more in touch with the human condition tm. And my coworker in his forties, who doesn't have kids, is the same way in reverse. He's like, "I could never have a kid, we've already decided no kids, it's too late for her at least, and we wouldn't trade it for the world. We're traveling to Iceland, we're doing this and this and this." So they were both able to split it that way. It seems to be part of human nature to self-justify the path they've taken.

Where I sit in this pattern: when I was younger the idea was to move and live abroad. The idea is still to do that, but first to save up money, get out of student loans, then further the path and move abroad somewhere, get out of the rat race. The threshold keeps moving. We're always one mile away.

I really liked his whole thing on different types of knowledge. The one that stuck with me was, would you rather be with someone who didn't know anything and wanted to learn everything, or someone who knew a lot but thought he already knew everything?

Very interesting premise with the blind man. The writing itself is kind of amazing. It's very curt, very short, but it has a really nice rhythm to it, the most like a drumbeat, just quietly moving along. It's interesting to think about how the minimalism of the text relates to the actual thought patterns of the husband. And his eventual epiphany, where all he says is something like, "it was really something." It was almost orgiastic the way the text keeps building and building up to that epiphany moment. So how does the form relate to the function? That's the thought on my mind.

But the husband also mirrors the blind man by closing his eyes, trying to feel and share a connection with another human. So at those kinds of points, does language even matter? That's an open question. Does the better you can describe something mean you get more out of it, or less?

Both walkers are walking roads, going places. But Thoreau's walker is trying to leave the city behind and not think of anything. Frost's walker is in the woods too, very perceptive of the two roads, but before he's even taken the path he's already self-narrativizing it to the point where he's not in the same mindset as Thoreau's walker. In Frost's poem, choosing one road over the other was basically a matter of impulse. Then the temporal shift at the end turns that impulse into destiny. Frost is making fun of an impulsive choice that gets dressed up as meaning.

The cleaner through line is about language itself. Frost mistrusts language, or uses it ironically. With language we can trick ourselves out of believing that all decisions create differences. We can be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two meanings. Thoreau, on the other hand, loves language. He pulls from literature a lot, uses writers of antiquity to give weight to his arguments and his individualism, and there's a great-man idea running underneath where these great men wrote and so on. Ironically, he might even undercut his own getting-closer-to-nature argument by being too verbose and romanticizing it too much.

Carver shows another way of using language: not having the language is what actually gets the husband closer to the epiphany. So Frost mistrusts language and shows you how it can trick you. Thoreau loves language and goes a little too hard with it. Carver shows that not having language can be the way through.

The Frost narrator and the deferred-life version of me are doing the same thing. Living in the story you'll tell later instead of the moment you're in. Thoreau and Carver are both saying, in different ways, that you have to actually be here. And there's a tension I want to hold rather than resolve: this whole project is about getting the language back, reclaiming the writer-self who could say more than "I liked it." But the texts themselves are warning that articulation can become its own kind of blindness. Tonight gave me three different answers to that question, and they don't agree.