The fire in the ash
Facing the future armed with the past
If you are among the dozens of new readers since last week, welcome! To celebrate the one-year anniversary of
, I’ve removed the paywall from my five most popular posts, which I’ll link to in the body of today’s essay. has a powerful essay at on Albert Camus and echoes of the 1918 influenza in our own ongoing pandemic. We post new essays at Inner Life every Tuesday and Friday.Some years ago I read a silly magazine article titled “How to Move to the Country.” I can’t find it now — it’s buried, mercifully, in a paywalled archive. But it was written for city people and had rugged-sounding advice about buying a chainsaw and a pickup truck. As someone who grew up in the country, I know that the first item that should have been on that list was making friends with your neighbors. Country people might think of themselves as rugged individualists, but that’s not how most of them live. Needless to say, the potluck is not an urban invention. Sometimes community is a matter of necessity — not being able to afford every piece of equipment — and sometimes it’s just common sense that if you break your ankle while loading firewood, it would be better to have someone else close at hand.
There really isn’t a surefire way to prepare yourself for moving to the country. You just have to do it, knowing that you’ll make mistakes and that those flops will be the most memorable stories that you’ll have to tell. The same is true of any major life transition.
I launched this newsletter almost exactly a year ago after discovering that my preparation for life as an independent writer had been woefully inadequate. It felt a little like crowdsourcing therapy to admit that leaving academe was not like sabbatical. Yet writing honestly about that uncertainty resonated with many readers. So I thought today I’d attempt a similar meditation on a few things I did wrong one year ago, a few things I did right, and the takeaways from those hard knocks. Maybe reading about my mistakes will save you a little of that pain. And if you have a similar story to tell, perhaps you’ll share it in the comments or in this week’s Friday thread?
Not planning for self-care in advance
I saw a therapist for a little over a year before we moved. She helped me move beyond the need for external markers of legitimacy as a writer, such as an agent and a book contract. Somehow I thought that if I had those two things lined up, I could whip them out in conversation and people would take me more seriously. But this was a symptom of how thoroughly academe had conditioned me to depend on productivity and status for self-worth. My therapist pointed out the obvious: I was already a writer. I’d been writing for more than twenty years, and I really didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Fair points, and I took them to heart.
I’m not sure why I thought that the excitement of a new house and time to focus on my longform writing projects would take care of the rest. It is one thing to be writing literary work on the side with classes to teach and colleagues to chat up in the hallways during the many months it takes to hear back from most journals. It is quite another to face a month, two months, three months of unrelenting silence while you’re feeling adrift in a new place. Most editors and agents don’t respond to pitches at all unless they are interested, and I still have two pending nonfiction submissions that I submitted in January, 2022. Rejection is hard enough — indifference is worse.
By the time I realized that I needed to talk to someone again, I hit a couple of snags. My Iowa therapist wasn’t available because counseling licenses don’t cross state lines, not even by telehealth. And of course everyone in Pennsylvania had long waitlists. In hindsight, I should have joined some of those waitlists before leaving Iowa or immediately after arriving here.
Another option might have been to form an intentional support group ahead of time. We moved to be closer to my wife’s family, and they have been a crucial foundation over the past year. Even so, there are no writers or academics on either side of our family, so I often found myself emailing friends after exhausting my reserves. I’m eternally grateful to everyone who stood by me last year, who listened and read drafts and supported this newsletter. That is what friends are for, as they say. But I wonder what it might have looked like to give everyone more notice, to say something like, “Hey, I’m about to jump off this existential cliff, and I might need some of you to be there for me over the next several months. Would you be open to joining my support team?”
Asking for help is often harder for men than for women. I consider myself rich in friendships, but few of my male friendships are safe places to go with doubt or grief or other private woes. I internalized those expectations early in life. I was taught to stop whining, to suck it up, to suffer in silence so a coach or my father didn’t give me something to really cry about. Bruce Feiler bucked this trend when he formed a council of dads after learning of his cancer diagnosis. The idea was to leave a support system for his wife and daughters in the event of his death. Happily, Feiler recovered — and instead of disbanding, that community endured. It’s a good model for anyone, especially men who are more likely to default to their wives for support than to a broader network of friends. Even if your spouse is your soulmate, your closest confidante, it’s not fair to place the entire burden of a life transition on them. It’s possible to plan ahead better than I did.
Blindsided by grief
I thought that the primary sensation I’d feel after walking away from a toxic work environment would be relief. I’d already been grieving for at least five years. Like one of my sources for The Chronicle, I thought that after being worn down by hostility toward my discipline, perpetual budget calamities, and constant negativity, I’d been leaving little by little and effectively had already left.
But something happened on that last day that I can only describe as a death. Christopher Hitchens joked for years about how he had been “taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in [his] direction.” But his cancer diagnosis turned abstract thoughts of mortality into a concrete sense of exile from the living. When he woke up one morning struggling to breathe and called for an ambulance, the ride to the hospital was “a very gentle and firm deportation…from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”
Hitchens retained his characteristic humor while meditating on the differences between these two territories, which he named Wellville and Tumortown. But he also realized that many ideas that he had embraced, such as the Nietzchean maxim “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” were really hollow platitudes. Chemotherapy took away his hair, his verve, even his booming voice. This did not make him stronger, in fact – it made him feel “swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.”
I didn’t feel victorious or relieved on that last day — I felt like Hitchens. Emptied out. Exposed. Leaving a calling behind didn’t kill me, but it killed a large part of who I was, what I had built structures of meaning and purpose upon. There are people who can look in the face of that kind of loss and see only the positive, the way Randy Pausch does in his Last Lecture and Tim McGraw does in his hit song “Live Like You Were Dyin’.” But for some of us, that mindset feels an awful lot like denial. We can’t fast forward through our sorrow.
My bedroom office looks out over a field that the previous owner planted with native grasses and other flowering plants, including a patch of dazzling Maximillion sunflowers. It is a pollinator’s paradise. We have the field mowed every spring, and for a time it is a barren acre of dead stalks and leaves. But today I can see patches of green poking through. Every morning for the next two months the view is going to look different, first the carpet of fescue, then coneflower shoots and milkweed and a dozen other plants I can’t yet name. Soon the dogwoods will bloom, holding their gorgeous flowers on into June. For the first time since we moved, I feel like I’m in sync with the place, reaching for the sun like the garlic stalks that have weathered several hard frosts this spring.
It’s probably true that none of this could have been hurried along any more than the land can be urged to green faster than the season allows. But I think the pain might have been lessened if I’d known it was coming, if I’d had some foresight about the force of that blow.
Looking ahead by looking back
When we packed up our place in Iowa, I tossed all of my folders from graduate school. Photocopies of journal articles, class notes, annotated bibliographies, seminar papers. I kept a few things with handwritten comments that still mean something to me, but most of it went in the recycling bin.
I expected that it would be a symbolic purging, a ceremony to help me turn my attention to art and mostly leave that old life behind. But just as bereavement triggers a flood of memories — stories that insist on being told even as you are letting go — I found that I couldn’t just turn my back on the past. In fact, finding a way forward required looking back. Willa Cather embraced a similar principle in her slow adaptation to modernity. It’s why she is virtually the only American modernist to make any mention of the 1918 influenza in her work. As a classicist, she saw ancient stories playing out in the present day. And much of her later fiction turns on a paradox: visions for the future drawn from the distant past — stoking the fire still smoldering in the ash.
I wrote about Cather’s strange progressivism more than ten years ago, and it’s the best way I can explain why I’m still writing about academe a year after leaving. I’ve experienced a rupture in my life that is not unlike Cather’s description of the world breaking in two in the early twentieth century. But Cather wasn’t interested in holding on to the old world nostalgically — she honestly believed there was still life left in the art, music, and history that other modernists were throwing away. Just so, I still care about higher education as a practitioner of the liberal arts, but my focus is shifting to others: to younger faculty, who must weather another twenty or thirty years of teaching and service, and to academic librarians, those often-invisible guardians of the whole enterprise. What does the future look like for them? Does survival in academe really require rewriting the humanities curriculum from top to bottom?
I also care about the state of academe because I have three children. My eldest is nearly eleven years old. She’ll be weighing her options in six years. I think about her when I read about the student mental health crisis. I worry about her peer group when I see plaintive missives like the one from Danial Arias-Aranda at the University of Granada describing an epidemic of apathy among students that faculty refuse to address directly.
My daughter is an absent-minded professor before her time — leaving doors open and forgetting where she left her favorite pen because she carries a book with her wherever she goes, even to the microwave, where she reads while warming leftover pancakes. She loves Greek mythology and knows it so thoroughly that she sometimes interrupts my reading of The Chronicles of Narnia to note Lewis’s allusions. She was especially delighted by an appearance of the Maenads at the end of Prince Caspian. That particular delight — the intellectual conversation across the ages, Lewis’s incorporation of mythology into something new — is the very thing English departments think they have to cut in order to attract students. But it’s the only thing that has ever drawn anyone to literature. That’s as true for my daughter as it was for me.
I also think of my daughter when I read Alyson Vaaler’s harrowing account of how the administration at Texas A&M University, with the help of corporate consultants, removed tenure from all library positions last spring. My daughter claims she wants to be a biologist, but I would not be shocked if library science called to her someday. Young people like her deserve to have every avenue open to them, to be offered a broad spectrum of potential belonging, but instead they are being herded into vocational corrals. It’s like the misguided fear some people have of artificial intelligence becoming too much like us. No, the real danger is that AI is refashioning us in its image, the way corporate needs for certain kinds of workers are colonizing universities. A corporation doesn’t know what to do with a librarian who has the autonomy and self-directed purpose of a professor, so it remakes that person in the image of customer service.
There are other embers smoldering in the ashes. This evening I will finish teaching my first online course. It has been exhilarating to share that space with other writers, to feel the energy I felt last July at Prague Summer, when I spent every morning with other true believers in art. I feel the same spark from you, dear readers, every week. And I am grateful for the many new friends I have made online, including Mary Tabor and Sam Kahn, my collaborators at
, who have encouraged me to keep my intellectual curiosity alive. The life in all of these new ventures comes just as much from the past, from who I have always been, as it does from the present or the years yet to come.But the sight from my office that really makes my heart sing is the garden I laid out last fall. I spent two months sinking posts, truing rails, and building the raised beds that I expect to see bursting with produce this summer. I know of no better illustration than gardening of Cather’s paradox: looking forward by looking back. The feeling of pressing seeds into warm soil goes back to my earliest sense memories and even farther back along both sides of my family tree.
My garden is new, but it is filled with memories. Much of what I know about gardening I learned from my mother, who still tends a large garden in Montana. When I work the ground, I think of my great-grandfather’s pride in his own backyard plot in Richmond Beach, Washington, how he apologized to his son in one letter for tediously listing all of his plants in his previous correspondence (as I have also been known to do). I think of the Czech family that welcomed me to my ancestral village, Sokolí, last summer, how familiar it felt to sample their homegrown honey and preserves, how delighted they were to see my own photos of garlic pickles and cayenne peppers and purple potatoes. My wife likes to say that I’m not allowed to be a farmer. But I am. These are my people.
Gardening grounds me in history while also helping me discover Pennsylvania as a place: the different soil types, the last average frost, which crops struggle and thrive in the rainy valley where we live. And there is no better way to build community than to share a bowl of Sungold tomatoes or German Pink slicers still warm from the sun. We first knew love through food and its enveloping warmth, and it is hard not to feel some glimmer of affection for a neighbor bearing delicious gifts. Digging up a plot of land in anticipation of harvest is one of the oldest human traditions, a comforting anchor in an age terrified by artificial intelligence. It is a reminder that I didn’t have to throw everything out along with those folders from graduate school.
Leaving academe has often felt more like death than rebirth. There are still a lot of unknowns lurking in the fog of the coming months. I’m still rebuilding myself, still trying on terms like “content creator” and “journalist” to see how they feel. I have no checklist or formula to offer anyone who might be contemplating a similar transition. Some of my mistakes might have been avoided with a little more forethought, some of them I simply could not have seen coming without someone else’s story to guide me. And I can’t explain how to tell the difference between anchors from the past that can be released and those which must be held fast. But if our lives are a story that we are telling as much to ourselves as to others, then we might follow Sarah Orne Jewett’s advice to Willa Cather. As Jewett wrote in one of her letters, “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”
What teases my mind as I write these words is the thought of how my Brussels sprouts and broccoli are doing after a series of cold nights — a thought that binds me as much to all the other places on earth where my people have found places to belong as it does to this corner of Pennsylvania. It is heartening to know that for months now, if I wake feeling alone or unsteady, I can walk down to the garden where the new draws its life from the old.
No matter how much we prepare for some thing I don’t think we ever truly know it until we experience it. There is intellectual knowing of preparation and then there is knowing in the body that comes with experience.
One metaphor that helped me tremendously at other times in my life is the idea of compost. Leaving academia and Iowa, throwing out all those papers, etc., wasn’t a trash truck that took it all away, or a fire turning it to smoke evaporating in the air, but rather just the beginning of the long process of decomposing. Like the orange rind and banana peel that take longer than the kale, but never as long as the egg shells, compost only happens over time, in the dark, and with proper attention. What you are going through now is necessary. You are becoming compost that will then nurture the soil you have prepared, and in which amazing new things will grow, blossom, and bear fruit. As a gardener, you know that this all happens in seasons, and takes time.
Tend to the compost (the old/ past), tend to the soil (soul), and tend to the garden design (your hopes and dreams) in equal measure.
(this last sentence is a new thought for me, and hey, it’s not bad 😉)
Lovely, mournful and yet hopeful. I think all life stages can be as difficult as you described. For me, becoming an empty-nester has left me feeling similarly to what you describe.
My favorite saying is a twist on an old chestnut: when one door closes another one opens, but it’s hell in the hallway.
My you find your way out of the hallway soon.