The America that emerged halfway through my college career placed kids leaving fancy universities on an awkward footing, conformists and strivers up institutional hierarchies as they are: as the political and cultural center cracked and free-floated apart, Ivy Leaguers jumped on one or another floe, or else risked doing the splits like in a cartoon, as they willed the center to hold. Me, I soon turned around and headed back into the arms of the academy: off to Cambridge to study philosophy. It was also the only sort of venture for which my parents would pay, and I needed to buy time to write the screenplay that a friend and I had been developing.
I arrived to England in a puddle of mortal pain caused by a breakup. To bat it away, I got organized. I scheduled viewings of rooms, went to orientations for my college, set up a new email address, found a physician through the national health service, connected to the Wi-Fi, bought maps, bought a bike, downloaded Tinder, signed up for a library card, moved into the attic of an old couple's house, looked through lists of clubs, joined a crew team and wine society (though nothing ever came of them), contacted churches, which resulted in coffee at a shopping mall with a priest named Xander. Then the first week was over.
I remember England as bright, cold, bureaucratic, empty. Every afternoon I walked through a nature reserve with a sea of marigolds stretching for miles, beyond which lay a highway. To walk the full trail, I had to cross stretches of path so muddy that even with hiking boots on, I sometimes worried that my feet would get swallowed up and stuck permanently. Eventually, some entity or other went to work on the stretch and made it walkable. The sky at sunset in the English countryside over the hedged fields bare of tall trees is one of the most beautiful sights anyone can see, and it is easy to hope that these have looked the same way for 1,000 years.
Isolated in an attic, I stopped doing coursework and came free from nearly all tethers. I retreated from life slowly, burrowing into myself like a worm through dirt. Getting out of bed came to seem an achievement. Two weeks into the term I asked for the Wi-Fi password finally and barreled into a miserable week of sleepless, hallucinatory internet trawling: kids fighting on Worldstar, watching Worldstar, shooting up schools and prepping press dossiers, the river-ocean of cop shows, the parallel world of gangster rap, women throwing drinks on reality TV, men playing video games and filming themselves, everyone dragged to the one level, Bezos with his face sculpted, plumped, recontoured, waving to the iPhone cameras.
It was almost as if I was high. I barely knew where I was. I didn't leave the attic for several days. Clive and Tessa and their visiting son noticed and worried and invited me to tea. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if the world were really ending? That was a relaxing thought; it was continuing that seemed hard.
And then one afternoon, in what felt at once like a surrender to the algorithm and a final attempt at human connection, I signed up to be a streamer. Streaming seems to me, as transactions go, about the purest: the less I did, the better. My image and a handful of inexpressive words became the catalyzing agents in people's gathering, simmering attempts at release. One day I searched my channel name and found automated recordings of my public feed indexed on aggregator sites, including frames of my face. I panicked and quit. December came, and more doom-laden than ever, I returned to the site. The humiliation was often bizarre, indirect, creative. I bought electric clippers at a member’s urging and acquiesced in shaving a furrow down the middle of my head. The resultant look was that of an auto-immune patient, or madman.
The old couple in whose attic I lived was named Clive and Tessa. On my first day there, I sat in the car in an underground garage attached to a supermarket, and for an hour we talked without looking at each other. Clive was eager to talk (I would say he wouldn't shut up if he weren't so genial and well-spoken) in the way that retired lawyers tend to be, and indeed the way that so many old, isolated folks are, living with their wife at the end of a cul-de-sac in gray England. Why else does someone take in lodgers? He went on about the minutiae of the legal profession in England for a long time—clerks, barristers, chambers, common law—lots of lingo—and he was pleased when I said, "Like in Dickens?"
"Exactly," he said. When he was called to the bar in 1969, it was still exactly like in Great Expectations.
Eventually, I got groceries: almost solely brands that I knew from the US. Alpine Muesli, Oatly oat milk (invested in by Blackstone), Bone Maman jam, some of which I didn't know were multinationals. On the way back we talked about art. Clive had wanted to be an artist but felt boxed out by his father's talent. More recently, he’d wanted to write a book about the unfairness of criminal law proceedings to defendants, but the famous person who said he'd write a preface died before he got around to it. And anyway, Clive's brother-in-law had said, as kindly as possible, that the manuscript was unreadable.
I was fleeing, too literally, an America that felt unlivable. I was turning also for consolation to individual, real, fleshly, pre-partisan people. People who sit in cars and twiddle their thumbs and tell you their life story, or stand in the attic and rustle their bob and say their daughter won't bring her children around anymore. Because people, unlike public affairs, still manage to convince us that they're worth caring about. On that first day, I cared about Clive and Tessa already and promised to go downstairs to have dinner with them the next week.
Wine was still real. Families and marriages and houses and children and trust and laughter and studiousness and wind and sunsets and old trees and clever short stories were still real, even as all the idealizations crumbled or shattered.
As drab and as brutal as the university felt when I arrived, with everybody bustling around in a certain wry, agnostic deference to the way things work at this ancient and venerable university, and in this provincial and staid shire, and in this quasi-socialist and culturally stagnant country—as really other and dreadful as it seemed—in one respect, I was relieved at least not to feel paranoid or condescended to. I was not in Williamsburg or West Hollywood or anywhere else flooded with cultural detritus hatched yesterday in order to distract, deplete, waylay. At least I was bearing witness to a people, I thought, a people that, while in decline, still wore the stigmata of a fully mature civilization.
So there I had sat on the first day, on the third floor, and it smelled like my great-grandmother's house in New Hampshire, and I didn't have internet because I had forgotten my converter in the socket when I moved. And after dinner and unpacking and lying on the couch for half an hour in a stupor, I read Sicilian short stories I found in the study. And then, and then, and then—I did something I hadn't done in this manner—loose, and earnest, and sustained—in years. I began to write.
***
On Wednesday, Tessa and Clive invited me down for dinner. Clive spoke admiringly of Margaret Thatcher. They asked me nothing of myself, except for Clive to say at one point, kindly but unfoundedly, "Your father's a New York attorney?" But conversation flowed, as did wine, and I even got a bit out of Tessa about how her dysfunctional slob of a brother and sister with an estate in the south of France aren't very close, and yet—here's the key word—they are civil. Clive had a line about how aristocratic families, by interacting rarely, maintain relations.
Their garden was more glorious than I could detect from the attic window: a huge lot with an enormous, spreading, red-leaf, globular tree in the middle. It must have been 150 or 200 years old. Around the margins was a dense rim of bushes and flowers maintained by Clive and by a gardener who came fortnightly. Small pieces of white statuary nestled in the corners. An irregularly shaped pond with a tile border lurked, covered with netting.
Walking one day through the mud, beyond the marigolds, I had an experience I often do of remembering a whole lineage of experiences, which form behind the present image like evidence for a thesis, and which I am unaware of as a motif in my life until that moment. And then comes the feeling of there being an infinite chain of hidden lineages, important motifs that are invisible and pose a certain problem to any fixed sense of the character of our lives. And then I saw the point of my aimlessness: that by obeying every impulse, I was sketching a pattern nonetheless, since our nature is larger than the horizon of present and object-oriented consciousness can ever encompass. My life was an infinite text which could be renewed, rewritten, unveiled by exegesis.
At lunch in the cafeteria when I returned, I would meet my few friends: Zi from China, who was writing a PhD on algorithmic governance and the social credit system; Cameron, who was training to be a primary school teacher, though he was deaf and couldn't read lips covered by masks; Philip Johnston, a senior tutor of the college, who had studied math and then theology and then ten years ago become an administrator. But my favorite moments were on the walking paths, looking at the surrounding fields.
***
The second semester began. I had grown a small beard. Academically, I strayed far out of bounds into a seminar on ethnographies of fundamentalist and far-right groups in Britain and America. Everyone, most of all the teachers, stared at me blankly when I suggested an author might not be able to offer a perspective larger or genuinely separate from the Baptists she wrote about because her liberal attitude—half-fascinated, half-ironically distanced—made her really sort of a mirror image to her subject, or part of the same cultural spiral.
My hosts continued to extend peace offerings of food. I would stand on the narrow ledge, leaning down as Clive handed me a tray, saying, "Meet me halfway up the stairs. I don't want to spill your wine. Of all the odd jobs I had as a young man, I was never a waiter." One day Clive shared with me a letter from a UCLA professor he knew who used to stay in the room that I was occupying. The professor despaired of tribalism and Trumpism.
I supposed that if you're caught up enough in life, you could believe anything or be blind to anything. Beyond breathing, eating, staying dry, knowing others, it seemed to me that the good—our idea of value—was perfectly fluid, or could appear perfectly fluid. I read the book of Job, where God asks, "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?" To which I said, "No." God said, "The stars are not pure in his sight. How much less man, which is a worm?" To which I said, "Much less." The proverbs say, "Buy the truth, and sell it not." I said, "My writing is not the truth." Job spoke of "God my maker, which giveth songs in the night." I thought, I could use one of those. I had run away on the basis of the aphorism that every decision that superficially isolates you, isolates you only from the mindless interplay of consensus while preparing you for deeper, rarer comings-together. But what if first you come apart?
***
I made it through the year. I found a cheap grocery store. I learned about which apps people use in England, which sushi restaurants they go to. I saw transgender awareness flags, even graffiti that said "TRANS IS HOT." I heard Clive staggering through the house intoning, "Darling, darling, darling," never in anything other than a sweater, Oxford, loafers, trousers, craggy, handsome face, and gold-rimmed reading glasses halfway down his nose with a tuft of white hair. One day he brought up duck for Sunday lunch. Another time he wrote me a letter about how he was taught at a Billy Graham Crusader Camp never to masturbate.
Spring started, and I felt liberated. Reason is always a mask for passion, always a rationalizing veneer rather than something with its own autonomous reality or structure. And spring seemed like good evidence; it was like a Northrop Frye-an symbolic order of politics, where rightism is winter and leftism is spring, or leftism is youth and rightism is age. Suddenly I was able to travel back into my 19-year-old self who didn't know anything and felt that maybe I should walk across campus and wear short-shorts and be confused and excited and aroused and not be able to see very far beyond those feelings.
I didn't finish my degree. I moved back to Brooklyn. The pandemic faded, and only the smallest remnant wore masks. Gradually, I conceded. Made friends and compromises, got a job, even found a partner my own age. But my year in Cambridge was surely the burning-out of one strain of suffering and the butterfly that touched off a chain of consequences within me. Or just a terrible interregnum: a glimpse of antiquity before involvement with the life of the world, a violent re-engagement that the lockdown's end forced upon me and everyone.
In a corrupt society, apostasy becomes a virtue and recusal of oneself from the mainstream a necessity. Sin even assumes instrumental value. I spent a year in England becoming mired in sin, retreating into the idiosyncrasies of a private order. Oddly, it was this severing from the moorings of community, the feeling of distance my larks overseas gave me from a sphere of social censure, that allowed me to begin to write in my own voice for the first time. A year and a half ago, we shot the screenplay. Three years before that, in the cold, bright hell of England, I had undergone a peculiar sort of second birth, a glorious withering.
