Traveling at Home

Bishop's poem "Questions of Travel" is aptly titled, since it does not give any answers. Yet, the trajectory of the poem begins with apprehensiveness towards various geographic features of the earth, and after the poem begs the reader to consider the reasoning behind seeking different parts of the world and lays out a list of things that would be "a pity" (lines 30, 42, 47) to miss, the poem seems to veer on the side of celebrating the human need to satisfy wanderlust, - the desire to travel. Still, only rhetorical questions are provided to illustrate the poem's perspective, and the value of staying at home and imagining experiences may be equal to that of physically having those experiences.
     If you have ever had a conversation with me about exploring the Adirondacks or traveling, it is likely that you have heard me expressed my guilt over having wanderlust. I have always judged the need to travel to be a sign of weakness in a person, an attitude that probably developed from engaging my imagination muscle through reading books, writing, and creating scenarios for stuffed animals and dolls as a child. There is this sense of superiority I feel when I am able to stay in my room all afternoon and come to the dinner table with a changed perspective and memories of near-sensory experiences (thoughts?) just from exercising my mind. I have asked myself time and time again "must we dream our dreams and have them, too?", except in my own words. And as I temporarily dwell in this new place filled with mountains I have not climbed, animals I have not heard call, a view of the stars I have barely gazed at, firs I have not smelled, and fresh air I have not tasted, my faith in the infinite power of the human imagination is constantly challenged. Just as there are colors and vibrational frequencies unbeknownst to our reality, just as every form of artistic media--including these words-- has its limitations, our imagination is not everything. There would be no books if there were not inspiration, and the only inspiration that I know of stems from the world around us. Even our dreams reflect all we have perceived from our exterior in this life. So, I am not so ashamed to want to travel anymore.
     But still, I do not know where my home is. "Continent, city, country, society"-- They are all so similar. If home is everywhere, am I never home, or am I always home? If my imagination is strong enough to give me all that I need and desire, and I could get along just staying at home, if home can be "wherever that may be", does staying at home mean that I actually do not stay in one place? Perhaps the earth, the universe, even,  is smaller than I have been interpreting it to be. Perhaps I am always staying in my room, and my imagination is no less weak.

Insider/Outsider Narratives

While Bill Bryson is explicit of his role as an outsider entering the trail - his inexperience and distance often serving as a subject for humor - his position carries with it an indifference and lack of sympathy. His anti-romanticism and cynicism, though self-directed and widespread, seems at times unnecessarily harsh. With the subtitle “Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trial,” the reader might expect the locals of Appalachia to not so simply be reduced to caricatures, as Bryson often does.  In describing the dangers that he might encounter on the trail ahead, Bryson follows a list of dangerous animals with “loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex.” While admittedly this line made me chuckle upon my first reading, Bryson’s stereotyping of rural culture is left unaccompanied by a genuine analysis or comment.

Is it impossible, I wonder, for an outsider to truly capture the narrative of the insider? Bryson, of course, hardly attempts – capturing the voice of the Appalachian local is not his objective.

Conversely, the photographs of Shelby Lee Adams provide an intimate insider view into the lives of Appalachian locals. Having been raised in rural Kentucky, Adams notes that: “I think of my work as an insider’s view…When your blood’s connected, and you’re born and raised in a place, you’re always connected.” His work portrays a culture of people who are rarely seen but frequently portrayed in popular representations through hyperbolic stereotypes. Adam’s work provides a direct glimpse into the ordinary aspects of their lives that Bryson, as an outsider, not only ignores, but instead actively speaks over. 

In our Common Experience Seminar, the narrative of those living in areas of the Adirondacks with high rates of illiteracy and poverty have gone largely unheard. The fractal peripheries of the Adirondacks are such that the insiders of this place are often simultaneously outsiders – the owners of Great Camps and luxurious summer homes have access to a different Adirondacks than the farmers and hermits do. Nearing the end of our time here, I see this place through a liminal lens - as much as I might take advantage of the local discount, there are a myriad of Adirondack aspects I can still only understand from afar.

Some of Adams' Photographs:

Elizabeth Bishop and interconnectivity, and confinement.

The Mountain confronts nature with the language of loss.  It's striking because the diction conveys destruction amidst the unnamed something that remains constant and unchanged.  For example, words like "burn" (l.3), "sifted" (l. 26), and "clambering" (l. 19) speak to the active dissolution of things.  At the same time, words like "hardening" (l. ), "hang" (l. ), and the lines, "Shadows fall down/lights climb" (l. ) speak a certain perpetuity and permanence of the unnamed thing(s).

Mostly, the confinement comes from unrealized starts and questions that Bishop, for example, "start for a second" (l.2) only to "halt" (l.3).  This is mirrored in the repetition of "Tell me how old I am", the unanswered request for confirmation.  Without it, the speaker is confined to half starts and inbetweens.

I liked to think about this poem's interconnectivity in relation to its confining language.  Alexa mentioned the belief that all beings and matter of the earth is one, or nondual.  This presents the world many identities operating fluidly as one.  But, what if Bishop is asking if there is only one identity operating as many things, and, for some reason, is confined by the unbroken permanence of this identity?  Maybe as the speaker is confined without reprieve, so too are the nature elements that Bishop writes.  For example, light, hardened wings, unwiped waterfalls remain as does the speaker's question for self-awareness.  Bishop does not write these elements of nature as confined by unanswered questions, but perhaps the question pertains to them as it does the speaker.

This poem is tricky, I love it, I will keep reading it.  It's hard to write in the uncharted terms of the religious/philosophical idea of nondual.  Additionally, nondual in the context of religion represents freedom, or furthermore, peace.  However, Bishop's poem takes the identity piece and flips it, though I don't exactly know for what purpose.

Expert Amateur

Bill Bryson's book offered a refreshing, new perspective to our class. As Onno said, Bryson really commits to being an expert amateur, which I feel shows in the content of his writing. Bryson constantly emphasizes his outsider mentality and his inability to do certain things the way people who were more qualified would. The combination of self-deprecating honesty and more than generous amounts of exaggeration create a comical tone for the novel.

This is the type of book I wanted to keep reading and reading; this may be a result of humour but I am not sure why else. Onno questioned our class if Bryson's book was the kind of book that inspired you to go hike the AT. I immediately thought, "No way." Then wondered why I found this book interesting. It didn't inspire me to do anything, it almost sells itself as a book about hiking the entirety of the AT trail but isn't a book about that, and it's pretty long and detailed.

I wonder if it was because of how common Bryson made himself seem. He successfully pulled this off by using the second person in relatable instances. This allowed the reader to become apart of the experience rather than an observer of the experience. Was that why the book interested me? I felt like it was a journey I was also embarking and I needed to know how it'd end? I am still unsure of Bryson's purpose. What was his intended goal? Who is his target audience?

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was when Bryson would go into serious scientific detail about the nature or culture around him. One part that really stuck out to me was when Bryson mentioned the Jack-O-Lantern mushroom that received that name because it glowed at night. This image was beautiful to me, the fact that that mushroom exists is amazing, and it also reminded me of the one of the beginning chapters in Ed Kanze's book that we read this summer. When Kanze goes under his house he finds a glowing moss commonly referred to as "Goblin's gold." When I read that part of the book I thought that was incredible; that was the strongest, most intereseting aspect of the book for me. It was interesting to have a similar experience like that in Bryson's book.

The Personal Challenge

I found the most interesting part of A Walk in the Woods to be how inspiring it is. I don't know what makes the book make me so interested in completing a big grand gesture, especially since he himself does not and is none to favorable in his account of the experience. Maybe part of the draw is being able to humbly brag about your accomplishment at dinner parties and on first dates, so the others around you know that you are someone Who Has Done Something. But, nonetheless, a third of the way through the book, there I was with an urge to just take the time to complete some personal challenge. My personal challenge would not be to walk that far, or even a third of that distance, but to complete a long reading challenge.

There are a few I could choose from. The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, which consists of reading the more than 300 novels that appear in Gilmore Girls, or a Goodreads challenge length of my own choosing (probably around 200 books for the year), or I could do Bustle's year of reading only women, or read Penguin Random House's 80 Little Black Classics. There are quite a few challenges to choose from and each introduces you to many novels you might not otherwise prioritize. And I think that being able to say that I had accomplished something like this, like reading that whole Rory Gilmore list, would be an interesting experiment and would force me to read some of those influential classics I could otherwise continue to ignore in my pursuit of other, usually newer, reads.

Additionally, there are reading marathons, held in different cities around the world, reading different books at different times, that would be another challenge. New York City holds a marathon read of Steins' Making of America, Dublin hosts Bloomsday, at which Ulysses is marathon read. These never ending readathons would be another interesting challenge - say attending 4 in a year. Or another challenge could be to visit the real life places in or that inspired the settings and events of something like you 50 favorite novels. One could read all the books long-listed for a certain award. There are a lot of options.

Logistics of Thru-Hiking

Bill Bryson talked a lot about what he and Katz went through while actually hiking on the Appalachian Trail—the long days, the harsh conditions, the monotony, and the occasional beautiful view that makes everything seem a little bit okay—but he doesn’t talk about the specifics that make thru-hiking a long trail so different from a regular backpacking trip. Thru-hikers need to plan for months in advance for the kinds of food they want, mailing packages to themselves, or hitchhiking rides into small towns and figuring out ways to buy a week’s worth of non-perishable foods from a gas station that will miraculously fit into an unyielding 10 liter bear canister. This is without thinking about gear: the narrator does have a very amusing section about his experiences at a gear store purchasing everything he needed for the Appalachian Trail, but I didn’t think that it did justice to the immense amount of thought and planning that goes into carrying everything you need to survive in harsh conditions for 40 weeks in a single backpack, carrying all of the essentials and not an ounce more. As much as he described in detail the experience of taking physical steps on the trail, thru-hiking is so, so much more than that.

A Walk in the Woods and Wild are both very successful, popular books about hiking long trails in the United States that have recently been made into films. These stories are inspiring tales of people stepping out of their comfort zone to try something new, adventurous, exciting, and possibly dangerous. There are a lot of readers that decided to hike one of these trails in response to reading or watching these stories: when Wild was published in 2012, the number of PCT permits issued spiked from 300 to 2,400. It is impossible to know how many of these hopeful hikers actually reach the northern end of the trail, or how many of those did not skip sections, but the Pacific Crest Trail Association estimates that most of the new hikers are not doing it in a way that will get them to the end. There are reports of new hikers carrying laundry detergent and blow dryers on their 2,600 mile hike from Mexico to Canada. Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, even started a campaign with the PCTA called “Reasonably Wild” to encourage people inspired by her book to hike the trail only if they are truly prepared.

I really enjoyed A Walk in the Woods because of Bryson’s brutal honesty in he and Katz’s successes and failures in attempting an AT hike. They were unprepared and had hiccups, and that was completely admitted in the novel, and it ultimately didn’t matter because they had an adventure and had fun along the way. The logistics were not described in a lot of detail, but I don’t think that was the point.

I've Got the Beetz

In her poem, The Moose, Elizabeth Bishop captures the experience of travel beautifully. She colors the piece with fragments of conversations, the grandparents discussing "what he said, what she said", and the changing landscapes through the sensory observations of a passenger. Details range from "the smell of salt hay" to the "rows of sugar maples" and "clapboard farmhouses" (169). What I find most interesting is that not only can the sights and sounds change, but a bus or train has the potential to open its doors to a place vastly different from one stop to the next. Not just visibly or geographically, but culturally.

Over fall break a few weeks ago, I took a few trains to visit my mother in Pennsylvania. What should have been 3 trains turned into four, however, when I accidentally took an Express train that skipped the Haverford stop that I was intending to get off at. I realized I couldn’t do anything about it, so I got off at the final stop and would surrendered to taking a train back in the direction I had come from. At this point I was feeling pretty dumb. Suddenly, buckets of rain began to fall from the sky just as I was getting off the train to walk over to the other track.

The train I was now going to take back was scheduled to arrive at 7:04, so when one pulled in at 7:05, I started to make my way to the closest car. I was stopped however by an Amtrak worker whom I had spoken with earlier, telling me that this wasn’t the train I wanted in order to get back to Haverford. (I had asked him if I could buy a ticket on the train because, obviously, the ticket window was closed). And then there was a moose on the track! Just kidding, there wasn’t. But I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.  

I waited about ten more minutes until another train came along. This time, I confirmed with the woman next to me that this was not in fact the Polar Express and that I was getting on the right train. She assured me that it was, so I got on the train and took a seat. Soon the ticket collector came to my aisle. I told him that my destination was Haverford; he asked me for the $4.00 fare. I found $3.05 in my pocket and proceeded to rummage through my pockets/bags looking for the rest, thinking I must have one more measly dollar floating around somewhere. I couldn’t find it. What I did have, were beets. I had taken a few of the squishier ones from the Mountain House so that they wouldn’t go to waste, and in this moment I had more root vegetables on me than cash. Excuse me, kind sir, I do not have the remaining 95 cents, but would you like a nice, soft beet? No Amelia, you are no longer in the Adirondacks, you can’t just barter vegetables for train fare. Luckily, it didn’t come to that; the man took pity on me and left me and my bag of beets.

It struck me how in just a few train rides I had gone from a place where it would not have been strange to be not only carrying vegetables, but substituting them for currency, to a place where I was simply a confused, inept, waterlogged member of society. I wonder how greatly the stops in Bishop’s poem differed. Would the passenger with the two market bags going to Boston have had anything to say to the woman shaking her tablecloth seen outside the window? Would they have bartered their items?

photo: http://theverybesttop10.com/angry-wet-cats/

Alice Exists

            When we spoke about Alice Wolf Gilborn during class we talked a lot about how confused she must be because of sentences like, “If I didn’t exist, I could live happily in the Adirondacks without ever having to challenge nature in order to prove myself.” (91) Statements like these seem to make almost no sense. How can you not exist and still live in a place, much less live happily there?

But consider the context of this sentence. The paragraph above the one in which she makes this seemingly ridiculous statement is all about how small and insignificant she is. “If the sun was just a pinprick of light in the scheme of things, then the earth was microscopic and I was infinitesimal. Zero, in fact.” (91) Later, she goes on to talk about how big she is in comparison to an ant, how powerful. Throughout the entry she plays with the idea of size and importance.

I’m not sure that there are any coincidences out there. But I have learned very quickly, and over and over again, that contradictions are all around. They are the one consistency I have found in life. They are the reason so many things make no sense at all. Maybe this is the exact idea that Alice Gilborn runs into while writing this passage. How can she be so big to an ant and yet mean nothing in the scheme of the universe? If this is true, can’t she also not exist and live happily? And don’t hermits (the ones who live alone and don’t become famous because of what the write while outside of society) live without existing?

Definitions

A couple of nights ago, Ice brought up a question at dinner—what is the difference between a canoe and a kayak? For a moment the answer seems simple. The four boats sitting outside of the Mountain House are classic examples of both canoes and kayaks: the wide, green plastic boats without a top deck, with two webbed seats, and a series of wooden thwarts across the top are easily recognizable as a canoe, while the shorter and narrower bright plastic boats with a clear cockpit for one paddler and two covered hatches for gear storage is a very typical kayak. There are canoe paddles and kayak paddles, the strokes are different, they are often used in different bodies of water, etc… but there are a wide range of boats that can be called canoes and a wide range of boats that can be called kayaks, so how can the difference be defined? Further complicating things, in England, “canoe” is a blanket term for what we would call kayak and canoe.

In Mason Smith’s essay “You Hear Loons Calling”, he talks briefly about the term “canoe” in the 19^th century. The history of canoes goes back to some of the earliest Native Americans: Smith talks about the early birch bark canoes, with pointed ends reaching high into the air. He says that the canoes in the Adirondacks in the 1870s were similar to Eskimo kayaks and log dugouts, but made out of material typical of European boat building (Rooted in Rock, p. 353). In that case, how is an Eskimo “kayak” so easily compared to an Adirondack “canoe”? It seems like there is not enough of a definition to use these words to distinguish one from the other. If the Adirondack canoe is a more modern style of boat than I had imagined, and was not in fact directly related to the Native American canoes, than how can a canoe be labeled as traditional or non-traditional? Over the summer I worked at a wilderness canoe camp, and they placed more importance on the traditional construction of these wood-canvas canoes than I ever thought possible. The first time I called one of those canoes a "boat", I got dirty looks from everyone in that room before I was semi-politely corrected that these are "more than boats"--they are canoes. That pride for the craft is present in the Adirondacks, but the name of the vessel seems less important. Smith's description of a canoe as a moral object is not about its adherence to a traditional shape, but about the time spent building it and respect for the craft itself. Using a canoe as no more than an ends to a means would be immoral. Maybe, in the Adirondacks at least, the name and specifics of the design are not as important as the time and care that went into its construction.

Sue Halpern

Ned and Mae live off the grid, literally, in a world of their own making.  I was struck by how Sue Halpern illuminated Ned and Mae's intentions in a way that humanized them.  The common perception of hermits to those of us living within society is not favorable; they might be crazy people with bad intentions or missing the ability to connect with others.  Halpern gives life back to Ned and Mae to the point of making those of us in society seem somewhat dehumanized for choosing the consumer culture of our time.  For a writer to convince me out of my comfort is unusual, and respectable.

Obviously, targeting consumerism strikes a nerve to a reader, like me, who only takes some time away, to "escape" to a small town and live in a well-constructed rural place.  Tide detergent and Kraft macaroni are still sold in the grocery store, espresso is served in fine china down the road, and my home is a luxury estate on the side of a mountain.  Escape means less than it once did, when the Adirondacks really presented visitors with wilderness and few feeble structures.  Ned and Mae noticed an impending shift at a time of development and settled deeper into the same woods I merely occasion.  Halpern doesn't commend this pursuit, in fact she suspends judgement just enough for a reader to see Ned and Mae as humans yet still consider them specimen under Sue's lens.

So, they have lived full lives of self-sufficiency, but I must ask to what extend they merely pretending?  How can the fringe of their lives brim the tight hems of our society?  Do they exist apart from everything, as they desired?  Or are they more embedded into the world as most know it than they cared to admit?  I think my distrust stems from Thoreau.

My romantic side wishes them the detached lives they so desired.  My questions are aimed at Halpern, wishing that this essay were a book because her voice seems not to color the depiction of Ned and Mae.  I can smell Mae's nightly popcorn batch I want to hear Sue coax out the inner weavings of their lives.    

Great Camps and hermits

Adirondack Great Camps and Adirondack hermits are two very different, very important parts of Adirondack history and what it means to live in the region. The Great Camps, constructed for the very wealthy and their friends, and the hermits, individuals seeking solitude in nature, exemplify the struggle of the park, the struggle to find a balance between outsiders and insiders. Shoumatoff writes about the ridiculousness of many of the Great Camps: he writes that they are architectural nightmares with bizarre layouts, great propensity to burn down, and paradoxical. These camps, which he notes are signs of having conquered nature though are supposed to provide a means to enjoy nature, embody nonetheless the necessity of outsiders. Hermits are the insiders, they aren't wealthy or opulent or fragile. Halpern writes that Mae and Ned did not become hermits accidentally. They did not wake up one morning to discover they were living separate from others in a hard to reach place with barely any money. Instead, they searched for three years to find the place they would disappear to. The insiders are more intentional. They have to be; there is no money for them to fall back on, no other homes, no stable job in the city like that of the outsiders. 

I think that writing about hermits and Great Camps in necessary in an anthology about the Adirondacks. The abundance of nature and the uniqueness of this place make both possible. I wonder if writing about Adirondack hermits and Great Camps will ever help balance the two extremes of life in the park or if the divide will remain or grow worse. Acceptance of hermits who live off land they do not own are no longer tolerated as lovable eccentricities and great showings of wealth are ever more criticized as awareness of economic disparities in the park grows. I hope that, in the years since 2000, Adirondack writing has become more palatable to a national market and brings a more critical eye to the living legend that is the Adirondack Park. 

Being a Hermit with You

Because it is impossible to go about one's life without having some sort of community connection, no one can truly live their life in solitude. For example, Lily Martindale's family and friends were knocking at her door and ultimately looking after her well-being. And as Sue Halper explains in "The Place of Solitaries", "[w]hen Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live for two years, it was a young man's experiment". Even though Ned and Mae are proclaimed hermits, and their lifestyle "was no more an experiment than tilling the soil is an experiment for a farmer" (120), the fact that they live together in the same house makes the sincerity of their hermitage questionable. Yet, I think that if a person is a hermit in their mind and has made an effort to live off the grid with as little interaction with outsiders as possible, then they are indeed a hermit.

None of the Adirondack hermits we have read about are absolutely separated from society, but what makes them hermits is the fact that they have built their own society that can sustain itself with little reliance on external resources. Halper describes the micro-community of hermits beautifully when she says "[Ned and Mae] have the society of each other, and they have poems, and they have fresh apples, and no one to tell them they can't" (120). It makes sense that if there are less people and institutions involved in running a system, then there won't be as much differing opinions and backlash that hinder a system's liberties. Perhaps hermitage would be better defined by its community byproduct rather than its lack of interacting with the community.

The hermit community is one that survives through stories left behind, and those who aspire to get a taste of hermit customs examine the way ones have lived (mostly through secondary sources, since the nature of most hermit is to limit their accessibility). In "Solo", Sue took a copy of Walden with her on her solo canoeing expedition, treating Thoreau's experience as a model. Even though she was careful to not "bend the rules" (121)-- rules unwritten that had no urgent consequences-- taking Thoreau's book with her was a way of connecting with another human being the entire extent of her trip. As memories of her grandfather flooded her mind, and other people on the lake interrupted her peace, Sue realized the innate futility of her goal to get away from others and have the solitary experience she envisioned. Both Sue and other Adirondack hermits we read about were largely unaware that total absence was impossible, since there was never such a thing. The hermits of the Adirondacks are always known, always someone's child, and even though someone like Noah John Rondeau may never meet Ned and Mae or Lily Martindale (hypothetically, if they were not fictional characters), their contribution to the Adirondack hermit culture -- a sub-culture that cannot be denied even if it is not shared by many -- makes them members of a community. Whether a hermit lives physically alone or with another, in theory, they are always being a hermit with someone else, even if that person is a nineteenth century romantic or living contemporaneously halfway around the world.

If I didn't exist, I wouldn't have to write this

I found Alice Wolf Gilborn to be one of the most perplexing writers we have read thus far. My confusion is not due to complex or intangible ideas presented within her work but rather due to her off-putting tone. After reading her short bio in Rooted in Rock, I think her tone matches her personality. She is an editor, a critical woman whose job is to have an opinion. After knowing that fact, it is not hard to believe that she wrote with such a tone in "Proving Grounds."

I found her overall purpose to be quite perplexing. She often tried to be funny and failed, which made reading the piece quite confusing. I think the comical failure was due to her lacking tone throughout the piece. She seemed to be writing a journal-like entry, something meant to be read only by herself which can be successful but was not done very well in this essay.

What I found most intriguing about this piece is that Gilborn spoke about people coming to the Adirondacks and overcoming nature, overcoming themselves, and eventually finding their roots. "Over coming" nature fell under the umbrella of all outdoor activities, such as hiking Blue Mountain or hunting. She says that when people do this, they are finding their own roots and thus proving themselves. She spoke about a hiker and said, "You know they have hiked a long way or are preparing to hike a long way, but you don't ask them why because part of proving yourself is to do it and not talk about it except to yourself. That you can do endlessly." She talks about herself and says that this is not how she finds her roots, instead her roots "extend only as far as the first comfortable chair."

These few lines made the entire essay much more appealing to me because in her own way Gilborn was overcoming her own nature, finding her roots, and proving herself. Although she did not do this by hiking, but rather by sitting in a comfortable chair and writing. This made the overall personal tone make much more sense. She is not intending to tell this to a large audience, instead she is proving herself by doing it and only talking about it to herself (as she claims the hikers do on their long hikes.)

How To Make Friends Without A Shirt

In her piece, Civic Literacy, Sue Halpern points out the unifying elements of literature. She claims that despite often reading by ourselves, “books serve us a set of images and experiences and emotions that become part of our common language”, and that those of us who may have read the same text might consequently “share a language and a landscape”(129). It’s incredible how many examples of this I can think of, and not just limited to the literary world. Several of us in this house speak Grey’s Anatomy (“He’s coding”, “You’re my person”, marriage post-its, etc.). Many are familiar with the muggles and squibs of Harry Potter, and a few fluent in Pixar (“He touched the butt!”, ”No capes.”, “To infinity… and beyond!”).

Halpern’s example involves sharing the Narnia series with a 9-year old child. One of my recent experiences was quite similar. A few weeks ago, I substituted for the librarian in Keene Valley who was attending a conference for the morning. Every week, classes walk down from the Central School for one block period and have class at the library. The librarian reads them a story and teaches them about a related topic before they pick out some books to check out for the week. When I filled in, the third graders and I talked about vegetables and read a story called “Muncha, Muncha, Muncha”. They told me all about their favorites: carrots, turnips, sweet potatoes (well, maybe those are just my favorites), and tomatoes. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that tomatoes are fruits.

The fourth graders were next, and since I had total liberty as far as my “lesson plan”, I decided to teach them about the brain. We established that it is squishy, has two parts (for now), and allows us to move and think. Although that information probably won’t secure my degree in neuroscience, I thought they nailed it. I chose a short story from Unreal, by Paul Jennings, which was a spooky tale about a boy who can’t speak without finishing his sentences with the words, ‘without a shirt.’ He was teased mercilessly at school for this without a shirt. He couldn’t help it without a shirt. You get the idea without a shirt.

The boy and his dog end up searching an island and finding the bones of his ancestor, a pirate who sailed centuries ago. The bones wanted to be together and reassembled themselves as he found them (these children probably had nightmares about this, oops), until the skeleton was almost complete. Throughout the story, any time the boy said anything, he said ‘without a shirt’ at the end. Each time resulted in a stifled fit of giggles from the class, until by the end, they couldn’t contain themselves. At the end of the story, the dog finds a shirt buried on the beach and brings it to his owner. When the shirt is reunited with the skeleton, the boy claims that he feels much better, and only then does he manage to say it without saying ‘without a shirt.’

After the reading, I checked out the books they picked out and they lined up to go back to school. Despite having only spent 45 minutes with these kids, their departure prompted several rounds of affectionate, suffocating hugs. “Have a good day without a shirt, guys!” I couldn’t believe how quickly they trusted me, asking me about anything from the science of the brain to which books they should try. I figure it must have been because we both now spoke the same language without a shirt.

Whether you speak Law & Order, medicine, Jane Austen, or there is a total language barrier (Adirondack rodeo, anyone?), Halpern’s reflection couldn’t be more accurate.

hermit

In class we talked a lot about weather or not Lily really was a “hermit”. She definitely was not what we generally consider to be a hermit or what we typically think of when we imagine a loner like herself. A hermit is someone living in solitude but Lily was never really that alone. Even when she returned to The Hill she was still connected to the outside world through Jim and Ellie and even the press and random trespassers.

            Still, I think she was a damn god hermit. She was more of a mental hermit than she was a hermit by excluding herself from society. What I mean, is that her mind existed in solitude, even if she didn’t. After leaving the city and returning to The Hill, she was looked after by a few people, but not because she asked them to, or even because she wanted it. She longed for aloneness and time with herself and the place in which she was her most authentic self. What is most impressive to me is that she was able to resist Jim so adamantly for so many years. From time to time he attempted to fill what most people would consider an essential need, the need for intellectual stimulation by contact with others. Lily’s mind was a fortress, even in sickness, both mental sickness and physical sickness, she denied all help, simply because her mind was too strong, too closed.

            Throughout the book I admired her most for that quality, the part of her that loved aloneness without ever feeling lonely. This is exactly why I was so disappointed when she ended up with the doctor. It seemed so counter intuitive to the character Shartle had been developing for 200+ pages, a character made stronger by her solitude. I’m not sure if “the happily ever after” ending was less work than something more tumultuous and Lily-like, but it seemed completely out of place.