“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

Well said, Henry.

Speaking of which, I'm quitting the blog. At least for now. Keeping up with it (or the world) while I'm out here is counterproductive to my hopes and goals for the summer.

The obligations of a writer, as I see them, are twofold: first, to live well, and second, to translate that lived experience into the written word.

I am twenty-one years old, and for the moment, exclusively concerned with the former. Living well is already a full-time job.

I have nothing else to say.

West.

"The closer you get to Canada, the more things'll eat your horse."
-The Missouri Breaks

Well, Montana's pretty close. 

"If all mankind were to disappear,

the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."


-E.O. Wilson

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

-Jack London

A triune from C.S. Lewis...

Pun intended; get it?

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"You can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes."

I’m working as a farmhand out in Livingston, Montana with my girlfriend this summer.

I start the two-thousand mile drive out there as soon as I finish finals in a couple weeks. From there it's three months of five-AM wakeup calls and living in a camper without electricity.

I can’t wait.

Doing this has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. But whenever people ask me why I’m so anxious to give up creature-comforts in exchange for hard labor under a hot sun, I can’t seem to come up with a good, cogent answer. Instead, I offer them a series of vague platitudes about personal growth. I talk about the transformative power of the openness of the American West, and the freedom with which it has always been associated. I mention the need for solitude and quiet in any sort of genuine introspection, and the increasing difficulty of finding either solitude or quiet in a contemporary American society saturated with the intrusive clamor of social-media. I tell them the belief that money begets food, if you really think about it, is nothing more than an inducted superstition. I tell them that convenience is a cheap trick, and although we do less, we aren’t any happier; I say that everything not directly necessary for physical, intellectual, and emotional sustenance (i.e. food, and books, and love) is not only superfluous to life, but maybe even an active impediment to finding any meaning in this world.

But when I say these things, my voice runs thin and I can’t help but feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I am, regurgitating a bunch of half-chewed mush I’ve read, and heard, and felt, but never experienced; I’m like a coach who’s never played the game. I don’t actually know if any of the platitudes I offer are true—and when I say them, it’s clear that I don’t know, that I’m bullshitting, that I’m exactly the kind of person to whom most people don’t like to listen for very long.

Still, I speak because I have a hunch that my words hold at least some truth-- hell, I desperately hope that they do, because anxiety has always tipped the scales against meaning in this upwardly-mobile life I’ve been taught to live, and I don't see it getting any better without some sort of radical change. I suppose the possibility of finding truth in the spew of my words, even if it’s only a kernel, even if I’m going to need to look for the rest elsewhere, is why I’m willing to sacrifice comfort for three months of hard work. I also recognize that I imagine Montana as Arcadia, and I know that there are plenty of wake-up calls in store for me this summer. I’m sure that physical labor is largely miserable; I’m sure that solitude is both lonely and boring; I’m sure that simplicity is not only inconvenient, but unglamorous, too. But I don’t know these things, either. I don’t know what is true, and what isn’t, and that difference is exactly what I hope to sort out.

So, the best answer for why I feel the need go to Montana, an answer that thus far I’ve been unable to articulate, is that I want to go so I can answer that same question myself.

You may have sensed in my previous post a certain cynicism surrounding the merit of American higher education.

Granted, my acridity may have been recently exacerbated by a string of late nights (early mornings, really) writing critical essays on 17th century metaphysical poets and memorizing the rules of predicate logic. I have a week to go until finals, and I am ready to be done. This is not to say that I don't like school-- I do. Or learning-- I do. What I do not like, however, is school, or learning, solely in the hopes of some reward: a grade, a GPA, a job. That said, I don't want to seem young, or self-righteous, or stereotypically liberal, because I probably am all those things. So, I'm going to hand the reigns over to Wendell Berry, who you'd be hard pressed to call any one of them:

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”