Environment

I can’t help but read Che’s diaries with a great deal of envy. His adventures, in their scale and import, as well as his descriptions of them, filled with color and humor and that delicious Latin penchant for the poetic, far outclass anything of my own. Che talks of being a ‘creature of his environment’ at the time he wrote his diaries. I can see that he’s right, but not, or maybe not only, in the sense that he meant, as an idealist non-proletariat. His writing exudes the bustle and quirk of Latin America, of years spent shaped by sun and the necessary shaping of communal and personal character around the necessity of overcoming material obstacles. I can see, too, how his shift to become a revolutionary was shaped by his environment, how accidentally shooting dogs in his sleep, struggling with a dying motorcycle, and battling the million unmotivated hassles from authorities could provide enough absurdity and frustration to lead one down that path that leads from ideals to the material dialectic.

What in my environment has shaped me, I can’t help but wonder? To what can I contribute my languid prose, my confused bourgeois mentality, my journeys based more around incompetence and anti-climax than heroism or adventure? The mountains of Utah, the feral desert of Escalante, the raging rivers of Washington, these were the backdrops of my childhood, and do they not seem fitting instigators of manly decisiveness? Wallace Stegner found sufficient inspiration at the University of Utah for his tremendous works, whereas I have found a strange mix of near-successes and mitigated failures, friendships gained but easily lost, loneliness and enlightenment, comraderie and intellectual stupor. My European days would seem less promising, first Lille, that armpit of France home to conservative-Communism and eternal rains, and Lodz, a factory town without factories filled with decaying capitalist palaces and post-communist commercial wastelands. Yet in fact I liked both of those places fairly well and felt that I prospered or didn’t prosper in them at least as much as I did in my time nestled in the foothills of the Rockies at the U.

Where are my journeys leading me? I can easily trace my intellectual history as it played out against my physical environment, going from a naïve conservative idealism in the sheltered crèche of high school to the radical post-modernist nihilism of my first exposure to University life, to a practical but degenerate syndicalism in Lille to my current skeptical and undogmatic liberalism in Lodz. Yet such a tracing gives it a coherence which belies the haphazard and effervescent nature of each of these transformations. Even so, it seems but little to indicate a direction or hint at a final goal, except an early onset of the ‘sell-out’ abandonment of all ideas usually found after middle age and children have sapped the energy.

But, as I contemplate the next jump in my life as a We, I’m beginning to feel another mind shift brewing. I don’t think it will offer any more definitive answers than the others, but it promises to offer more hope, and for that I’m excited