Two days after my high school graduation I drove with my older brother to Keystone, Colorado. Our plan was to spend the summer in the mountains before coming to UNT for the fall semester. Although “plan” is probably too strong a word, since we hadn’t thought to secure jobs or a place to stay before setting out.
Lucky for us, the town was in need of unskilled laborers, and we were able to quickly find work and an apartment. The apartment was actually employee housing – a furnished room with bunk beds plus a kitchen that we shared with our suitemate. Though humble, it was the first place I’d ever lived without my parents, and as such it held an unshakable air of sophistication. Besides, that aforementioned suitemate was a female who scandalized me by her very existence.
My brother worked as a waiter that summer, which meant that I got to eat free breakfast on occasion. My job was with a hotel. I held the position of “house boy,” and carried myself with all the dignity implied by that title. For all its down sides, the job gave me plenty of time to think.
I spent long mornings pushing a vacuum cleaner up and down cavernous hallways. The burgundy carpet was already clean, and so I understood my work there to be essentially ceremonial, drawing parallel lines along the length of the floor. The stillness of the empty meeting rooms and the drone of the vacuum created the perfect environment for uninterrupted reflection. I had time to think about my impending college career and the adult life that awaited me thereafter.
One recurring daydream went like this: I would work for a large chain of hotels. I would be some type of vaguely executive professional travelling to all of the different, but unfailingly exotic, properties owned by the company. I wouldn’t need a house because I could always stay in the immaculate rooms of the gleaming hotels. All my meals would be eaten at nearby restaurants. There would be fried foods.
I didn’t get very far into my reverie without thinking of women. There would need to be a female. Easy enough. I would be married, and my wife would travel with me. I would work during the day while she swam, read, or applied cucumbers to her eyes (as women in hotels seemed wont to do). I felt sure that my future spouse would be pleased to permanently live this way.
If you think that I made some mental accommodations for my progeny then you have overestimated me. Children had no place in this fantasy. It would just be me and my thoroughly relaxed wife floating frictionlessly through the world. We would live happily without ties to anything, anyplace, or anyone.
Silly as it was, my daydream was quintessentially American. It followed a pattern visible in the work of the beat poets and country music radio. Hit the open road. Follow your passion. Chase your dreams.
But all that rootlessness tends to ignore an important fact: other people matter. We humans are social animals, intended for community. And community is the native soil of good conversation.
If we’re to have any hope of real dialogue, then we will have to cultivate the kind of relationships that can sustain it. A room full of friends engaged in meaningful discussion is the reality of which social media is only a simulation. But unlike social media, a room full of friends requires some limitation. It demands that the participants inhabit one particular place and that they speak with specific people. As Wendell Berry put it:
No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.
My summer in the mountains eventually came to an end. When it did, I came to Denton to start school. I have been here now for about 18 years. I am decidedly less cosmopolitan than I imagined I would be; yet I can’t help thinking that parochialism is a small price to pay for community.
This is the sixth post in a series on the topic of conversation. Links to the previous posts are below:
1. How to Impress a Teenager
5. A Fair Fight