IN THE BEGINNING was the Word. Ben Bronshtein sat in an easy chair in his study, a book in his hand, staring blankly through the window. His carefully laid out plan to deal with the long-anticipated mid-life crisis has reared its head, reached back, and got busy trying to swallow its own tail. For years, he had been complacent. With respect to most urges that run at cross-purposes to people’s prior existence, urges that even tenured professors are liable to experience at various points in their lives — to marry or to separate, to have children, to renovate the kitchen, to go walkabout — he felt quite safe. He and his wife had been married for thirty years, to each other. Children had been duly had, brought up, educated, and seen off to seek fame and financial independence in the coastal cities of their choice. The rather dilapidated kitchen in their aged ranch house he was happy enough with: as a cook of some experience, he knew that ideas, ingredients, and skill are more important than implements. If there was anything in his situation and disposition that, he felt, carried a potential for disruption, it was the geographical restlessness bug, abetted in part by his uncompromising preference for a type of terrain diametrically opposed in spirit to the dairy farms and rolling wooded hills surrounding his upstate university town. The mental state induced in men of a certain age by decades of family routine, a newly empty nest, and the growing murmur of bodily intimations of mortality often focuses on going away and leaving it all behind, and doing so in style — or at least on acquiring the means to go away in style, perhaps a special ride, with high handlebars and a low rumble. In Ben’s case, the going away, repeatedly, was itself long part of the routine — the academic routine, which he liked not the least because it involved attending conferences in faraway places, and also because outside the school year it left him with plenty of time to indulge his love for the wilderness. For him, not just any kind of wilderness worked: it had to be the biblical desert, a torrent of sunlight spilling over rocks and sand. Back in Israel, biblical was of course the local standard. When his parents brought him there as a teenager, the desert was what he got imprinted with: an experience akin to being branded with a red-hot iron, but in a good way — a paradox that he was never able to explain to the funny people who failed to see why anyone would prefer a parched waste over a forest glade, let alone the back porch. With the move to America, he gained easy access to some fine empty quarters many times the size of Sinai on the map of the South-West. Over the years, his itineraries, deposited with his wife in advance, spoke of a growing attraction to places with names suggestive of thirst, sunstroke, or accidentally sitting down on a rattlesnake. Eventually, he took to seeing himself as an aging Ulysses, called upon by an irresistible urge to leave his Ithaca every time he returned to it. In pursuit of this literary fantasy, he discovered some curious details about his hero. It did not escape his notice that Dante’s Ulysses has been consigned to the Inferno, as a punishment for seeking “to follow the sun to an unpeopled world” — di retro al Sol, del mondo sanza gente, as his favorite bilingual edition had it. As a habitual solo hiker, who spent the long weeks between one getaway and the next poring over maps in search of some new Death Valley, he thought it reprehensible that such a cruel fate should be meted out to anybody simply for wanting to see what lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He resolved to see if something could be done about Dante’s mean-spiritedness, even if the redress came seven hundred years late. His anti-Dante action took the form of a seminar: about Ulysses as a model, not of homecoming, but of restlessness. Working on the draft of the syllabus, a holy mess of readings from the classics and from psychology, got him thinking. What was Ulysses really being punished for? For hearing as a child the tales of Laërtes, his father, about the voyage of the Argo? For learning of the kinship of Anticlea, his mother, with Hermes, the patron god of travelers? For growing up on an island known chiefly for its pig husbandry, wondering where the white sails go as they disappear over the horizon? For having been tricked into joining a foreign war and returning twenty years later, hopelessly addicted to wandering the wide world? As he was musing over his family history, it occurred to Ben that, with the probable exception of divine descent, similar excuses could be found for his own wanderlust. The seminar brought about a certain catharsis in some respects but made things worse in others. It was fun to listen to young people, away from home for the first time in their lives, try to imagine and understand an urge to drop everything and sail beyond the sunset: as always, this made him feel younger himself. By mid-term, a few of the students did start to sound like they were ready to drop out and head west; he hoped the experience hadn’t accidentally rewired their brains more extensively than college education is liable to. But — his own compulsion did not abate. Guessing the etiology of an obsession proved to be not the same as asserting control of it. The least he could do under the circumstances, Ben thought, was write the whole thing up. Perhaps the problem would then resolve itself automagically, like a software bug that hides in your code in plain sight until you go over the instructions line by line, adding comments — or, better yet, try to explain each line to a fellow coder who is watching over your shoulder. He already had all the materials, collected when he was doing the homework for his class. When the semester ended, he retreated into his study, drew down the shades to shut out the spring morning, and sat down to write. When the year that Ben has allotted for the write-up ran out, he called a halt to major combat operations and used the lull to assess the state of the battlefield. He did not have a good feeling about it. The text that had emerged from under his cursor was, on re-reading, fairly appalling in every respect. His sentences, with their starched syntax and uncertain delivery, sounded like a bunch of former Tsarist intellectuals after a forced revolutionary reeducation stint in Siberia. His borrowing of phrases from the classics bordered on scandalous. His penchant for the flaunting of erudition made every chapter a minefield of cultural references, ranging from painfully obvious, via maddeningly oblique, to too obscure to ever be noticed by a reader. The twists and turns of the narrative confused even him. Given how nasty and brutish his style turned out to be, the story’s only redeeming value was being also short. He was briefly amazed at just how far one is prepared to go, and how little to have to show for it, on a mix of too much motivation and too little craft. He erased the text, deleted the backups, and set about to learn the craft: to write effectively about thinking, he must first think carefully about writing. That, of course, called for more reading. For another year, Ben followed the familiar routine of filling his spare time with books. Unlike writing, which for him was always a chore, reading never was, not even now that he was older. Among the few distinct privileges of middle age is being able to reread one’s favorite books through the eyepiece of experience. Borges, that writer’s writer, he had saved for last. In an essay that must have gone right over his head when he had first read it, he now found the key to his problem. A phrase, it said, can only be understood in context, which can be the entire life of its author. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he realized that achieving insight into one’s life by means of writing about it is logically impossible. Ben finishes reading the essay, closes the book, and sits a little longer quietly holding it in his lap. Damn the word, he thinks, the man was right: in the beginning was the deed. A hike, the right kind of hike, the big one that he had been mulling over for so long, the Vermilion trek — that’s what he needs. He sets the book aside and goes off to start packing. ❧ ❧ ❧

IN THE BEGINNING was the Word.

Ben Bronshtein sat in an easy chair in his study, a book in his hand, staring blankly through the window. His carefully laid out plan to deal with the long-anticipated mid-life crisis has reared its head, reached back, and got busy trying to swallow its own tail.

For years, he had been complacent. With respect to most urges that run at cross-purposes to people’s prior existence, urges that even tenured professors are liable to experience at various points in their lives — to marry or to separate, to have children, to renovate the kitchen, to go walkabout — he felt quite safe. He and his wife had been married for thirty years, to each other. Children had been duly had, brought up, educated, and seen off to seek fame and financial independence in the coastal cities of their choice. The rather dilapidated kitchen in their aged ranch house he was happy enough with: as a cook of some experience, he knew that ideas, ingredients, and skill are more important than implements. If there was anything in his situation and disposition that, he felt, carried a potential for disruption, it was the geographical restlessness bug, abetted in part by his uncompromising preference for a type of terrain diametrically opposed in spirit to the dairy farms and rolling wooded hills surrounding his upstate university town.

The mental state induced in men of a certain age by decades of family routine, a newly empty nest, and the growing murmur of bodily intimations of mortality often focuses on going away and leaving it all behind, and doing so in style — or at least on acquiring the means to go away in style, perhaps a special ride, with high handlebars and a low rumble. In Ben’s case, the going away, repeatedly, was itself long part of the routine — the academic routine, which he liked not the least because it involved attending conferences in faraway places, and also because outside the school year it left him with plenty of time to indulge his love for the wilderness.

For him, not just any kind of wilderness worked: it had to be the biblical desert, a torrent of sunlight spilling over rocks and sand. Back in Israel, biblical was of course the local standard. When his parents brought him there as a teenager, the desert was what he got imprinted with: an experience akin to being branded with a red-hot iron, but in a good way — a paradox that he was never able to explain to the funny people who failed to see why anyone would prefer a parched waste over a forest glade, let alone the back porch. With the move to America, he gained easy access to some fine empty quarters many times the size of Sinai on the map of the South-West. Over the years, his itineraries, deposited with his wife in advance, spoke of a growing attraction to places with names suggestive of thirst, sunstroke, or accidentally sitting down on a rattlesnake.

Eventually, he took to seeing himself as an aging Ulysses, called upon by an irresistible urge to leave his Ithaca every time he returned to it. In pursuit of this literary fantasy, he discovered some curious details about his hero. It did not escape his notice that Dante’s Ulysses has been consigned to the Inferno, as a punishment for seeking “to follow the sun to an unpeopled world” — di retro al Sol, del mondo sanza gente, as his favorite bilingual edition had it. As a habitual solo hiker, who spent the long weeks between one getaway and the next poring over maps in search of some new Death Valley, he thought it reprehensible that such a cruel fate should be meted out to anybody simply for wanting to see what lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He resolved to see if something could be done about Dante’s mean-spiritedness, even if the redress came seven hundred years late.

His anti-Dante action took the form of a seminar: about Ulysses as a model, not of homecoming, but of restlessness. Working on the draft of the syllabus, a holy mess of readings from the classics and from psychology, got him thinking. What was Ulysses really being punished for? For hearing as a child the tales of Laërtes, his father, about the voyage of the Argo? For learning of the kinship of Anticlea, his mother, with Hermes, the patron god of travelers? For growing up on an island known chiefly for its pig husbandry, wondering where the white sails go as they disappear over the horizon? For having been tricked into joining a foreign war and returning twenty years later, hopelessly addicted to wandering the wide world? As he was musing over his family history, it occurred to Ben that, with the probable exception of divine descent, similar excuses could be found for his own wanderlust.

The seminar brought about a certain catharsis in some respects but made things worse in others. It was fun to listen to young people, away from home for the first time in their lives, try to imagine and understand an urge to drop everything and sail beyond the sunset: as always, this made him feel younger himself. By mid-term, a few of the students did start to sound like they were ready to drop out and head west; he hoped the experience hadn’t accidentally rewired their brains more extensively than college education is liable to. But — his own compulsion did not abate. Guessing the etiology of an obsession proved to be not the same as asserting control of it.

The least he could do under the circumstances, Ben thought, was write the whole thing up. Perhaps the problem would then resolve itself automagically, like a software bug that hides in your code in plain sight until you go over the instructions line by line, adding comments — or, better yet, try to explain each line to a fellow coder who is watching over your shoulder. He already had all the materials, collected when he was doing the homework for his class. When the semester ended, he retreated into his study, drew down the shades to shut out the spring morning, and sat down to write.

When the year that Ben has allotted for the write-up ran out, he called a halt to major combat operations and used the lull to assess the state of the battlefield. He did not have a good feeling about it. The text that had emerged from under his cursor was, on re-reading, fairly appalling in every respect. His sentences, with their starched syntax and uncertain delivery, sounded like a bunch of former Tsarist intellectuals after a forced revolutionary reeducation stint in Siberia. His borrowing of phrases from the classics bordered on scandalous. His penchant for the flaunting of erudition made every chapter a minefield of cultural references, ranging from painfully obvious, via maddeningly oblique, to too obscure to ever be noticed by a reader. The twists and turns of the narrative confused even him. Given how nasty and brutish his style turned out to be, the story’s only redeeming value was being also short.

He was briefly amazed at just how far one is prepared to go, and how little to have to show for it, on a mix of too much motivation and too little craft. He erased the text, deleted the backups, and set about to learn the craft: to write effectively about thinking, he must first think carefully about writing. That, of course, called for more reading.

For another year, Ben followed the familiar routine of filling his spare time with books. Unlike writing, which for him was always a chore, reading never was, not even now that he was older. Among the few distinct privileges of middle age is being able to reread one’s favorite books through the eyepiece of experience. Borges, that writer’s writer, he had saved for last. In an essay that must have gone right over his head when he had first read it, he now found the key to his problem. A phrase, it said, can only be understood in context, which can be the entire life of its author. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he realized that achieving insight into one’s life by means of writing about it is logically impossible.

Ben finishes reading the essay, closes the book, and sits a little longer quietly holding it in his lap. Damn the word, he thinks, the man was right: in the beginning was the deed. A hike, the right kind of hike, the big one that he had been mulling over for so long, the Vermilion trek — that’s what he needs. He sets the book aside and goes off to start packing.

❧ ❧ ❧