Path and no-Path
Andrew
Andrew graduated from a good school as a popular, well-liked man. He got a job with a good firm in the city. He wed his sweetheart and they have three children now. In the years since he was hired by the firm, Andrew has been promoted three times. He’s no big shot yet, no vice-president even, but he has won a solid foothold on the middle rungs of management. He brings home good pay.
Every day Andrew gets up at the same time. He showers and shaves and puts on a nice dark suit and tie that are much like the suits and ties that all the managers at the firm wear. Andrew would never call this a uniform, but in his heart he does look on it as one, for when he straightens his tie and dons his jacket in the mirror, a sort of job-self comes over him, that differs from the Andrew who loves his wife and plays with his kids.
Andrew lives in a small town outside the city, on a quiet street. The houses on his street look much the same and bear only small differences from one another. The houses on the next street over, and the street past that, are much the same. This gives Andrew a warm feeling when he leaves home for work and comes back home again. It’s a solid, steady town and Andrew knows he belongs there because his house his car his wife and his kinds, and himself even, all match his neighbors. This is his town.
Andrew drives to work each day. He takes the freeway with all the others heading in to work in the city. The freeway traffic is thick and slow. Andrew talks about this with the guys at work. They share horror tales of traffic snarls and jams and the morons and maniacs who should never have been granted a license to drive. He also shares tips with the guys on other routes to the firm. There are five or six good ways to get to work and back. The freeway of course is the best and fastest, when the traffic is not too bad.
Andrew likes to bitch about the commute, and there are times he finds the job and even his good friends at work a bit too much. There’s nothing wrong with the folks at work or the firm, of course. But Andrew has been there almost ten years now, and he can see himself still there twenty years from now, and there are moments when it all strikes him as the same and more of the same, and there’s a small voice far in the back of his head that asks, ‘Is this all there is?’ And that small voice can remember the days when Andrew was young, not yet out of school, when he dreamed of his life and the adventure of his career. Somehow this doesn’t feel like his dreams. But everything he hoped to find is here for him. So it’s not that it’s the wrong firm or the wrong job or that there’s anything at all that’s wrong about it.
And yet the sameness of it all wears down on him at times, and when that small voice cries out it’s enough to break his heart.
There are even some moments when Andrew wonders what his life might have been had he chosen a different path. If he had quit school early, say.. If he had worked at different trades. If he had loved other girls. If he had lived in the city, or if he had moved out past the suburbs.
Andrew likes to think on this for it soothes his heart’s ache. He likes to think that whatever he chose, he would have made a go of it. He has always been well-liked, he has always been happy. So in the end Andrew sets aside these small day dreams and takes up is life again — the true life, the real life, the solid life of a good citizen and proud member of his community.
Andrew with all his complaints and daydreams shudders inside himself when he thinks of the life that Zack leads. Andrew would never in his life want to trade places with Zack.
Zack
Zack is a misfit and he’s always been one. He never much got along with anybody ever in his life. Sometimes he went out of his way to talk different, dress different, even walk different from those around him. Folks who thought alike and spoke and dressed alike got on Zack’s nerves. They annoyed him and he scorned them.
Zack was never handsome like Andrew. Zack was never well-liked. And it’s hard to say if Zack lives apart from people because he wasn’t good looking or well-liked, or if it was because Zack dressed and spoke different that folks thought he looked odd and even ugly, and didn’t care for him. Either way, whichever came first, both were true of him: he didn’t like people and they didn’t like him.
Zack quit school early. School is where the leaders of the group try to beat out of their young all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. School is where they mold all the Andrews of the world, who grow up to be leaders of their communities and in their turn support and guide their schools to beat out of the next batch of kids all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. This is what they mean by human life, after all.
Zack hated it. He hated his teachers and he hated the other students, the ones who fit in and did well and were thought to be good looking and well-liked. He despised them and he envied them all at once.
Zack lit out of town before he was even fully grown. He quit school, left home, got out of town. He went as far away from folks as he could get. Now he lives out in the wild.
There aren’t any freeways in the wild. There are no roads or paths or tracks. There’s no way to tell which is the right way to go. When night settles over the wild it brings with it a great deep darkness. When day breaks the sun blazes with bright fire that can be hard to take. The heat scorches in summer and in winter ice coats the land like an iron weight.
Zack doesn’t life in a cabin. A cabin seems too much like a house to him, a home like all the places they live in back in Andrew’s town. Zack puts up a little shelter where he beds down for the night. He kicks it down when day comes, and makes his campfire out of it. He doesn’t even want to give himself the chance to use it again or to stick around.
By now Zack has gone so far out of town that he’s lost his bearings and he can’t tell you which way leads back there where he came from. So even this guide that once he followed, the guide that led him away from the place where he was born, is lost. Now he just wanders with no real aim.
But I guess he has a sort of aim, if you care to call it one. When you don’t like folks, you try not to be one of them yourself. This is part of what drove Zack out of town and in a sense it’s pushing him to this day. He was always unhappy, either sad or mad. It’s a part of his soul and it has put down roots deep in him. So the more unlike other men he gets, the more unlike them he tries to become.
Zack’s feet are the most mis-shapen part of him. His shoes are ones he made himself and they may be ungainly and ugly but they’re strong. All the same they’re no match for the stones and stumps and vines and thorns of the wild. Zack’s feet have been blistered and cut and torn and swollen, in those years of beating out a way forward where no other feet have walked before.
Zack doesn’t think like other folks now. His thoughts are all a jumble. The words don’t link up right, they don’t make the kind of sense we all agree is the sense you have to make because it sounds like what everybody else is saying. That isn’t the way Zack talks or thinks at all. Sometimes he doesn’t even think with words but only pictures, or raw scraps of senses like a streak of heat, a dash of thirst, a sudden itch or the sense that he’s been bitten or stung by some bug that’s never there.
You can call Zack crazy, I guess we all would. We pity him or fear him back in town. A few of us, part misfits themselves, dream fine romantic dreams of Zack out there on his own in the wild. But they’d never go out there themselves. They’re not crazy after all.
Andrew and Zack were born the same year. But Zack looks old now while Andrew still looks young.
Zack’s isn’t a savage life. Savages have their communities and their fellowship, they follow their rules and are good looking and well-liked. The kind of life Zack leads isn’t even an animal kind of life. You could only call it by what it isn’t. It isn’t any kind of a human life. It isn’t a life fit for men to live as men.
But I wonder if you can say Andrew’s life is either.
Us
As in life, so in tales. Almost all the talesmen take after Andrew. A rare few take after Zack. We choose in our hearts to be like Andrew or Zack each time we start a tale. As time goes on we fall into a way of our own. It may lead us on after Andrew or after Zack.
And if it comes down to just happiness alone, then we’d all want to be like Andrew. There’s no doubt but Andrew is a happy man by any way of judging it, and Zack is a sad tormented soul.
If it comes down to just happiness alone.
(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, February 21, 2008)
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