Ryan McCarl

It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I had signed a lease that morning would remain occupied by the current tenant for another month. Profuse apologies from the real estate agent, and for me a restless night in a hotel.

I got a new set of keys and a new one-bedroom, and when the second move was complete I struggled a twenty-five-dollar air conditioner into the window, threw on a fresh shirt and shorts from the sprawled-open suitcase, and sat uncomfortably on the air mattress, sinking to the floor. A chair and desk would have to come later. I knew no one in the city.

Afternoon light filled the window, and the question of the night awaited my response. I had no response and a to-do list that was empty. Louder than the birds and car-horns and air conditioner’s drone I heard the chaos that is in me, the thoughts that will not be centered.

The night approached: I could see it in the window. The world open before me and I open before a world that does not know me.

I made an acquaintance at the bar near Harvard Square. She was curious about what I was writing in my leatherbound journal between sips of a Boston ale.

Three days later she sent me a message and asked if I had plans for the weekend. And I had to give the sheepish response that everything had changed, that I was back in the safety and stasis of my hometown, writing from a familiar coffee house, compulsively checking my e-mail between job applications flung hopelessly out into the ether of inboxes. I no longer lived or worked in Boston; would not be back in the near future, so far as I knew.

How did it come to this? Well, it was a Thursday night, my second or third night in the city. And the real estate agent called to say that the lease for the new room was prepared, the old one was void, and I would need to come in the following morning to sign. Twelve months at eight hundred dollars a month. A good place, overlooking the edge of Harvard Yard. Walking distance to a first job at least as good as any other.

But I am not the sort to comfortably sign twelve-month leases, and I immediately saw my opening, a swiftly-closing emergency exit door. The chaos in my mind rose to a fever-pitch. Memories of other options believed in, pursued, and gone: paths opened and unwalked. Rosy dreams of teaching flashing past images of a businessman in a suit, walking off a plane into some foreign flag-lined airport with a full wallet and a copy of the Journal under his arm.

And the next day it was over. The sun rose over the Mass Pike, hovered forever over the upstate highways of New York, and died as I charged forward into Ontario. The caffeine kept falling off and I kept stopping to recharge, and I fought against the fatigue of a sixteen-hour drive. By the time Flint passed in the Michigan darkness all the hopes of being homeward had passed: I was exhausted and afraid, unemployed and in debt.

I had explained myself over and over to friends and family on the drive, which keeps one’s mind off the infinity of the road but just the same drains our word-exhausted reasons into dust. I had no money; I would have to empty two retirement accounts in a rock-bottom market and swallow the loss to cover the credit card I would soon fill again. God that I might find new work, closer to home.

I am back from Boston and have several homes and none. Other doors have opened and closed. Ladders I have climbed so proud to reach new heights of discontent. I stand and live in the unimagined neighborhoods of the world, I occupy the career-dreams of others, but my heart rages against all reason and I reliably run chasing after something else, no different really than the dogs that destroy the grass in a yard by chasing whatever opportunity happens by.

Ryan McCarl

First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school.

Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and social classes, and about race and class relations in general? Interrogate your emotional, pre-rational political ideology: why do you think it is the case that some people are poor, others wealthy, and others starving? Do you admire military power, or are you suspicious of it? How do you react to talk of America’s present and past wars – World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan?

The first step to becoming a serious political thinker is to distance yourself, at least temporarily, from what might be called your “political inheritance” – the political ideas and values that you were infused with as a child and young adult.

Many of these ideas may be worth keeping, of course, and it is perfectly acceptable to venture into the wilderness of new ideas and then return, older and wiser, to where you began – but it is unacceptable to never waver, even in thought, from the political ideas you grew up with. You must rediscover these ideas to make them truly your own.

The second step is to understand your own interests and distance yourself from them for the purposes of political thinking.

Your self-interest, whatever it may be, can probably be translated into a political and economic ideology: you are in a union, so you support unions and vote for pro-union politicians. You are an investment banker or venture capitalist, so you oppose anything – including unions – that could interfere with economic “efficiency,” that is, with your ability to “restructure” businesses and shift resources around to make a profit. You own a home in an almost entirely white, middle-class suburb where your kids attend a top-tier public school, so you oppose policies such as intradistrict school choice and property taxes that could, you feel, threaten your lifestyle.

But mature political thinking requires that you think about politics in terms of the public good and what is best for society (or humanity, even) as a whole. That does not imply that mature political thinking requires a “liberal” political ideology: it is quite acceptable to believe, conservatively, that radical or revolutionary changes to the status quo would do more harm than good, or that the way things are should be tweaked and adjusted rather than significantly changed, or that the public welfare is best served through deregulation, lowered taxes, and the privatization of public institutions. But whatever political ideology you adopt, you must, if you want to begin thinking seriously about politics, adopt it for some reason other than the health of your pocketbook.

Of course, it often happens that people consciously or unconsciously wrap their self-interests in a veil of ideology – they disguise the fact that their political views are a function of their self-interest by speaking in terms of the public good, and often they even believe their own disguise. But serious thinkers must honestly examine their own views and biases, look at their own ideas with critical eyes, and constantly work to create distance between their self-interest and their political views. If these overlap, it must be by accident and coincidence.

Question yourself, your ideology, your vocabulary, and the beliefs behind your beliefs. And also question every overt and covert political statement, every candidate’s speech, every newspaper opinion column, every dinner-table rant, every historical narrative, and even every piece of art or literature. Politics touches everything and everything touches politics. Cultivate your awareness of the political dimension of the world, a dimension that is often hidden beneath the surface of things. A map, for example, seems straightforward and self-evident – but what part of the world did the mapmaker select as central? Which continents’ sizes are distorted?

And speaking of looking beneath the surface of things: advanced political thinking requires a partial distancing from the rancorous spats and celebrity politics that are all-too-often the central focus of 24-hour cable news stations, political talk shows, and the most popular political blogs. Thinking politically does not mean choosing a side, stepping into the echo chamber, and becoming one more unimaginative partisan foot-soldier – it is better to keep one foot in the fray and one foot in the slightly-removed world of philosophy, theory, scholarship, history, and literature.

For me, this means reading both conservative and liberal blogs and websites, but favoring those that are more thoughtful and less reactive. More importantly, it means monitoring the amount of online, print, and cable news I consume, and giving primacy of place in my reading to good books – which are intrinsically more thought-out, edited, careful, and less bound to a specific historical moment, than even the best newspapers and websites.

The third step toward mature political thinking involves understanding that we look at political issues through certain lenses – lenses of theory, of history, and of our biases and ideologies.

The best political thinkers do not get trapped in one lens. Rather, like an ophthalmologist conducting an eye examination, they shift from lens to lens and look at a problem through as many lenses as possible in order to identify which lens best clarifies the problem and points the way to a possible solution.

Let’s take the contemporary debate about school reform and vouchers as an example. Conservatives use the analogy of market economics to argue that if we privatize schools and school services and create a more competitive school system, the outcome will be better and more educationally efficient; liberals argue that it is a profound mistake to think about schooling in economic terms, and that we should focus on improving the public schools, which reflect our moral commitment to providing equal educational opportunity to every American child. But why not look at education through both lenses – the lens of economics and the lens of ethics? And also the lenses of history and law?

Take practically any political or economic problem and gather a room full of academic specialists: one each in political philosophy, political psychology, law, evolutionary biology, theology or religious studies, women’s studies, history, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Each of these experts will speak intelligently about the issue, looking at it through the lens of their discipline. And each will have something valuable to contribute to the debate.

And so we arrive at a final guideline for engaging in serious political thought: become a lifelong self-educator, and never stop critically examining your own political ideas and those you find in contemporary debates.

Political issues are infinitely complex, and the political loudmouths of our world who claim to have it all figured out are cashing in on a lie. You, their target consumer, have the power to reject the narrow wares they peddle and turn to better, more thoughtful sources.

If there is one slogan and sound-bite that is worth adopting, it is this: “Well, it isn’t really that simple.”

Ryan McCarl

Every day for ten years Robert had come to this café on the second floor of the Borders on North Michigan Avenue. He was a talented day-trader, fluent in the language of the market. He saw candlesticks and skylines in graphs where those with less training saw only the patternless movement of a line; in cloud-clusters of data points he saw writing as clear as Times New Roman type, with outliers dotting and flourishing the letters.

Some of his peers embraced the label “speculator,” but Robert rejected it – he was an investor, a finance professional. In earlier days, he had meticulously showered and donned a suit every morning, combed his hair and been out the door with a nod to the morning doorman and a swinging briefcase by seven-thirty – but that was only to visit Ahmed’s news-booth on the corner of Clark and Adams to purchase his cluster of morning papers, and then it was back to the office he kept in the corner of his small studio apartment. Dressed every bit as keen as if he had been entering the Board of Trade with a badge on his label and a firm behind him, and incoming calls on a cellular phone.

He did keep a phone, but it rarely rang. He was a broker for himself, and worked full-time on behalf of the same. His habits were rigorous: six morning papers (and the Journal read twice), several newsweeklies, and then the messages of the market. When necessary he would carefully consult the shelf of experts that sat above his trading desk: Fabozzi, Graham and Dodd, and others, and the great 20th century economists – Hazlitt, Hayek, and Von Mises, whom he loved, and Keynes and Galbraith, whom he abhorred but kept around just in case.

Now seventy, he still worked and would work until forbidden by the seal of the casket. But for the past ten years he had not worked from home; his practice was based out of the café in Borders. To his great impatience, the store did not open until 9:30, long after the market’s opening bell. (He had struggled with himself and with his sister over whether to move to New York to be more in tune with the schedule of the market, had several times packed the contents of his apartment into a few boxes and vowed to make the move that very weekend before the markets opened on Monday, but never seemed to be able to finalize things, to bring that decision to its lonely conclusion).

When the Borders manager-on-duty turned the lock of the first foyer door, Robert would be waiting without fail – the two exchanged a familiar nod and good-morning, and Robert quickly made his way up the escalator to claim the first cup of coffee poured that day, which he drank black. And then he sat at the very same table as the day before, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. After a sigh and an unlidding of the coffee he would fan his morning papers out across the table and pile a stack of books and company prospectuses high upon an adjacent chair and get on with his business of underlining and graph-reading, finding pictures heavy with meaning in the dimensionless points of the scatterplots and the suggestive starts and stops of the trend-lines.

It was the seventh of June, one of those rainy and sixty-degree days so familiar in the early Chicago summer. He knew the date well, and paused a moment with his pen hovering over an underlined section of a page. His hand trembled with a tremor he carefully ignored. The branches of the fir trees in the plaza stirred, and he paused to reflect: it had been ten years since he made his last trade.

Events in the window and in the café were different and the same – the other regulars, the eternal students, the homeless, and the businessmen seeking refuge from their offices in the Loop, had aged and changed their wardrobes, and many familiar faces were gone, having moved on to other cities and other lives. But Robert was a fixture of the place. On the rare occasion that a traveler with a bit of fondness in his heart for the café would stop by and look to Robert’s table and find it empty, a moment of disorientation and even sadness would follow: a reminder that even the most permanent things of this world must pass.

Ten years since his last trade, and ten years since he moved his daily operations to this table in the bookstore café. He permitted himself only a moment to reflect – this was one memory he could not stand to look at for long, and anyhow there was much to get done before lunch, and he could not afford to fall behind. But the anniversary of that day forced itself into his consciousness, will it away though he might.

One day, when very recently he had begun to dabble in short-selling, that is, betting that a stock would fall but assuming unlimited liability in case it should rise, he had misjudged the direction of a stock. A grave, grave misjudgment – his books and papers had failed him, and it was all he could do not to burn them and burn his apartment and trading desk down on top of them.

The next day, he was sick and missed the morning bell for the first time since his first day on the job as a mail-sorter and clerk for a small brokerage operation in his Indiana hometown. And the day after that, he had been lured away from his desk for a breakfast with his brother-in-law; his sister, who by order of some long-ago court supervised his accounts for reasons of a diagnosis he refused to name as he knew it to be false and a lie, begged off and was unable to attend. He ate anxiously with the brother-in-law and thought of the markets and how he might climb back to where he had been; he thought also suspicious thoughts, thoughts of betrayal – the food tasted strange and the tone of his brother-in-law’s voice was strange. His eyes were strange. Some of the more ominous messages that one finds in the chart of a stock-price may sometimes be found as well in the eyes of a man; this, too, Robert understood.

But it was too late. He returned from the breakfast to find his trading desk empty of its most prominent feature – the array of computers and monitors that surrounded and cradled him as he sat in his hard-backed chair. He always, without fail, locked his apartment door; for Robert to forget to lock his door would be for to the sun to forget to set or for Kant to forget to take his afternoon walk through Königsberg. Besides the landlord, only his sister had a key.

He searched the apartment and opened every cabinet five or six times over, threw his books and papers around the room, kicked his treasured copy of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis sprawling spine-broken into a corner, pounded with his fists on the imperturbable plexiglas of his floor-to-ceiling thirtieth-floor window overlooking the desolate landscape of the West Side. The computers, and his livelihood, were gone. Stolen by his sister, his one link to the non-economic world.

His was a blue-chip firm, and he had read much about companies bouncing back from crises. His business, too, would recover from this setback. It must go on – there was meaning in it, it mattered. And within days he had moved his operations to the table in the Borders café, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. The computers were gone, but in the end he had never thought much of that method of trading – had found it effeminate. The old paper-traders knew how to do things right after all.

Enough of such thoughts: Robert turned back to his papers and began furiously underlining the latest intelligence about the movement of copper prices – it was serious business, it would affect the summer production schedules of many firms in which Robert had an interest.

Eventually he finished his first reading of the morning Journal and, with a sigh and a cracking of his knuckles, turned his attention to the Tribune. Familiar headlines; then he unfolded it and his heart broke as he read, and read again:

BORDERS TO CLOSE FLAGSHIP MICHIGAN AVE. STORE

Ryan McCarl

Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”

Likewise, the histories of our time might say: there was an American invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that amounts to a crime, but it was quickly followed by other wars, a financial crisis, and an economic depression – and we found that we had enough problems on our plate without worrying too much about the past.

Americans are leaving the Iraq War behind; it is seen as an embarrassing episode, best unmentioned in polite company. The Obama administration is stacked with liberal hawks who supported the Iraq War, and figures from the former Bush administration are signing book deals and making the rounds of press conferences and interviews, propagating meae culpae of the “mistakes were made” sort. A war of choice is being quietly transformed into an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable mistake, one caused not by politicians and public intellectuals cocooned in their hubris and their reckless ideologies, but by an “intelligence failure.”

It is possible that Americans feel that, having elected a president who had the courage and foresight to oppose the Iraq War from the beginning, we have done our penance and can now move on with our national political life. There is no talk of holding any of the national leaders who dreamed of and executed the war accountable; the idea of war-crimes trials for the leaders of a rampaging superpower is a pipe-dream, far removed from political reality. And so while the Iraqi and American families who lost everything in the war struggle to find stability and rebuild their lives, the great majority of Americans are far too concerned with the sudden evaporation of their wealth, savings, and jobs to spare a moment to reflect on Iraq.

While there is no denying the severity of the problems Americans face in the present, our ability to navigate future crises depends upon our ability to learn from the mistakes of the past. Most Americans have come to acknowledge that the Iraq war was a mistake – and that’s a significant start. However, the challenge peace advocates face is to demonstrate that the war would have been a mistake even if it had been “successful” for the United States.

Back when the easy credit was flowing, stock prices were ballooning, and the reality of the American failure in Iraq had not yet set in, President Bush remained popular enough to easily win reelection. The “antiwar” sentiment that followed the 2004 election and led the Democrats to sweeps in the national elections of 2006 and 2008 must be seen for what it is: a mood, and not a lasting realignment in American politics. Not a wholesale turn away from war, but a realization that we have lost one particular war – the war in Iraq. (Some will object that America is “winning” in Iraq, but I argue that no reasonable observer, looking at the totality of the American military adventure in Iraq, could conclude that America’s conduct should be called a victory.)

American peace advocates have convinced the vast majority of Americans that withdrawal from Iraq should be a priority; we have made the case that neoconservatism and its idea of spreading democracy at gunpoint is a ludicrous theory whose proponents should be held accountable for their failures in Iraq and elsewhere; and we have worked hard to elect many vocal, unashamedly anti-Iraq War politicians to office. But our work is far from complete.

Peace advocates must play two very important roles in society. First, we must remain fully aware of the movements and machinations of states, vigilant and ready to stand up against those who would engage in unjust wars (and they are nearly all unjust). Second, we must act as educators: we must constantly work to eliminate the psychological distance that estranges people from those who are or may become their “enemies.”

We must work to humanize the “other,” emphasizing the individual human lives obscured by the veils of labels, prejudice, and racism. In contemporary America, that might mean promoting the study of Arabic and Farsi and Chinese, reading Islamic literature, and increasing the number of student-exchange programs. Every small step matters. A popular recent cookbook featuring the “cuisines of the Axis of Evil” struck another blow against ideologies that would assign a lesser value to the lives of citizens in states considered “enemies.” Movies such as Slumdog Millionaire and best-selling fiction by writers such as Khaled Hosseini and Jhumpa Lahiri have introduced thousands of Westerners to alternative – and more human and realistic – ways of looking at the Middle East. Such works help to free us from the prejudiced, conflict-centered narratives we learn by watching the evening news.

Empathy is inversely proportional to emotional distance; we empathize most with our closest family and friends, and least with people on the other side of the globe. Political education must aim to combat apathy and stand between people and their prejudices.

One critically important way to accomplish this is to keep the memory of war – and, crucially, its effects on the individuals caught up in its maelstroms – alive. As Iraq recedes from the headlines and slips from the public’s mind to make room for the next “crisis,” we have a responsibility to give some thought to the two million Iraqi refugees displaced by the war and the tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed or maimed as a consequence of the war. And what we should remember is not statistics or grand narratives, but individual stories and the weight they lend to the principles of prudence, humanism, and nonviolence.

And yet as the Iraq War itself demonstrated, the memory of war’s horrors never seems quite strong enough to prevent the next war and provide for a lasting peace. Can individual citizens and educators change that? Can a nation’s conscience overcome its lust for political power and international primacy? There is hope – in the contemporary world we find a wide range of nation-states and polities, each more or less violent, more or less war-prone, and more or less democratic than the next. By remaining politically awake, working to improve our understanding of the world, and struggling to live our values personally and politically, we can use our small strength to work toward a better world.

I hadn’t been listening, and Charles looked at me searchingly as he finished his monologue: “And anyway, with the markets this crowded, there’s more cash floating around than there is demand – so we’re looking into alternative investments pretty heavily. Distressed debt, art, that sort of thing. And so here I am. What will you be doing down here?”

“Starting over,” I said. “Goldman hired me this spring, and over the summer I worked and trained in New York, and now I’ll be analyzing Japanese stocks for them. Based out of Tokyo with plenty of travel.” And I explained that I was just getting back into the field after a five-year hiatus.

“You’ve done it all,” he said, “and you are free – I have a wife and three kids, a home in upstate New York. And you, you just up and went.”

Yes, I just up and went. I can take some comfort in that. I am independent, solitary, anonymous, a man-upon-the-earth, a wanderer who answered the call to adventure and rejected the comforts of home. Alone and free against the madness of great cities.

…

I watched the plane window and waited for the appearance of coastline, but we remained shrouded in clouds even as we began our descent into Narita. Narita Kokusai Kuukou, I thought, and tried to shift my thoughts into Japanese. My heart was excited, and I waited in expectant watch. Charles continued his sound sleep in the seat beside me. I remembered how it had been at seventeen, my first time abroad and in Japan: the sun rose, Japan appeared, and I watched the apparition of the foggy coast and the first farms and houses with a girl in my arms – who knew we had twenty minutes until landing and then would never kiss or fool beneath an airplane blanket again, but we didn’t care and were focused on the moment. They don’t make moments like that anymore, not at thirty.

We landed and I walked into the new chapter of my life.

At customs: “Passport, please.” I handed it over and said something, and a raised eyebrow: Japanese OK? OK, I affirmed. He doubled his talking-speed to test me, and I said I was coming to work, here are my papers, staying initially with a friend in Tokyo until I find my own room. Tokyo where? Asagaya. Luggage? Carry-on only.

I moved quickly through the airport, still familiar in recognition if not recall. My eyes darted across the signs and my feet moved, thoughts suspended, and I smiled and bowed slightly to the workers and felt happy to be alive. And after changing money I arrived at the Narita Express, the train to the city center, and had time to buy an umbrella and pretzels before boarding.

As I waited, a conductor’s voice announced: several lines out of Shinjuku Station are closed, there is a typhoon approaching Tokyo. I’ve never seen a typhoon and look around the train-car, half-expecting to see my own excitement, or anything else, on the Japanese faces around me – but no one has turned their eyes from their newspapers.

The train leaves the station and is buffeted by rain. I open my journal and begin to write: This is my life made anew, this is my renaissance. I can go anywhere, do anything, and the cities of the world await me. And first, I’ll see Reiko – Reiko is meeting me at the station. I can’t wait to see her, it has been eight years and still she lives in Asagaya and will again meet me at Shinjuku Station. She is my window to this world, and I am ungrateful and a poor correspondent: she sent letters, and I responded months or years later.

We have to keep living, though the sets and actors change: such has been my attitude as long as I can remember, and it is difficult to keep in touch. Yes, the senior year of high school when she was an exchange student, and all those evenings we spent together speeding around West Michigan with her wearing my sweatshirts – and I sat on the dewy grass and cried when her plane lifted from the runway and slipped into the open sky, and didn’t see her again for four years – and then we had two weeks in Japan, with cigarettes in pubs, and dinners with actors and guitar-playing in parks – but then I was in New York, and no time to write. And then I met Rachel, and old memories tied to women faded and were lost for a time.

The train crossed rivers and the lights of love-motels and convenience stores began to appear in the window, and for a long time I sat and tapped a pen on the paper of my wide-open journal, and rain streaked the city as we burrowed further and further and the buildings began to grow beyond my sight. A red dot moved surely across an electronic screen and indicated our approach.

…

I arrived at Shinjuku Station, and my breath caught as I stepped onto the platform; everywhere the homebound remnants of a Friday night were moving to and from their trains. Lights – that is the image of Tokyo that burns into your mind, the childlike amazement that you never outgrow. The lights never go out in Tokyo. May they be a landing-strip that points my way to a home and happiness, and perhaps love. So many roads, grids of light – Again and again the paths branch, but no road is mine. Not this time, there is reason to believe that this year will be better than the last.

I paced and paced the station and was lost inside it, and was pleased to have to ask directions and loosen my throat; I feared, as always, that over the years my Japanese had packed up and went in protest against my failure to study and keep up with correspondence. I was pointed to a row of payphones, fumbled with the piece of paper, and called – the bright tone three times, and then a voice: Moshi moshi, Hello. And it was back, my speech and my memories. So many memories, inseparable from the language in which I lived them.

“Hey! It has been a long time–”

“A long time, a long time. Too long.”

“I have no idea where I am. Near the south entrance, the sign says – where are you?”

“Stay put, I’ll be right there.”

And in fact she was there, almost the same as always, and dressed in a raindrenched coat she ran forward and hugged me, and warmness flooded over me and I closed my eyes. And then opened them, and found that I was being inconsiderate – there was another there as well, a man. And my momentary heaven went suddenly cold, and unvoiced and unadmitted hopes rose suddenly to the surface and fled. But I blinked and admonished myself, and the vacuum was quickly filled with light and friendship.

We talked and I was led down a long hallway and up an escalator, and tried to take in the noise and the faces as we talked. Some moments are unembraceably large, but they too pass, almost unnoticed.

…

It is August, and some weeks since I started my job. I’ve found a rhythm: the train into the city, a day of work interrupted only by a lunch-hour of reading and writing, and then back to my tiny flat: an entryway with stove and sink, an adjacent closet-sized bathroom, and the two-mat room beyond that tripled as living room, bedroom, and office. Far better this way than last time I lived alone, in Manhattan – all that empty space, the tall ceilings where no heat could reach, the open floors where I paced. Here I need only rotate, pivot on a point, to find the things I need, and the space is full and not empty.

As every evening, I am exhausted and my eyelids are heavy, and I hurriedly drink a bottle of water and tie my running shoes, hoping to catch the final hour of day. I close the door behind me and stretch for a moment on the concrete balcony before bounding down the steps to the courtyard. The landlady was there – we had never met – and she stared at me in evident shock. I saw myself as she must see me: the first non-Japanese to ever set foot in this compound in Asagaya, far from the Irish Pubs of Shinjuku and the tourist marches of Harajuku and the Meiji Shrine, ten minutes’ walk from a minor station on a minor line of the rail system, a part of Tokyo never mentioned in guidebooks, nonexistent to the foreign mind. There I am – lost? An intruder?

I bowed and explained that I lived upstairs and was pleased to meet her, and there would be no trouble and I apologize for the surprise. And while she stood agape I slipped through the gate, and opened my stride quickly as I began the newly-familiar route. Now circling around bicyclers, now huddling against a wall to allow a car to pass along the narrow street. Past the cemetery, with traditional music playing softly from speakers mounted on the streetlamps. It’s comforting, the music, I had said; it’s annoying, Reiko had replied.

To my right the sun was setting. I ran, and ran, and with the passage of time my sense of alienation – the stares of the landlady and so many others, the universal assumption of strangers that we must communicate with grunts and points, began to relax and slip from me, and with it the accumulated stresses of my day in the office. Of late I’ve managed to resist my fears about work, about whether I am doing the right thing and fulfilling my potential, using what gifts I’ve been given. I treat such doubts as unwelcome, puddles to be jumped over. The flicker of a doubt, and I turn away.

And so with my doubts about Rachel: they arise, the could-have-beens, and I close my eyes and hold on to my grain of faith in the future. Freedom, I think; hard work; success. The surest path to happiness is the single-minded pursuit of accomplishment – I repeat that prayer to myself. Anxiety rises in me, cropping up at uncontrollable instances, but I wait for the day’s end and the run that awaits me. When I run, all of this is left behind, and for forty blessed minutes I am a being-in-the-world, entirely present, and my breath maps the heartbeat of eternity.

…

A Saturday morning, and I am walking the streets of Shibuya, taking pictures. I reach an intersection and turn each way, and follow whichever has the most activity. No destination, a traveler and his camera. Two months since I arrived, and still I have a sense of wonder and awe at my surroundings, and at the fact that somehow I among my people am the one who was selected for this life and its rapid changes of scene. I take hundreds of pictures, seeing the beautiful and new everywhere I turn.

With time I find myself returning to a familiar place, the third-floor Starbucks overlooking Shibuya Station. I sit on a barstool by the window, and below the lights of six intersections change at once and from all directions people wash into the open road, moving and scattering before another change and the cars and motorcycles replace them.

I think upon these things with music in my ear and my pen upon the paper, a stack of books advertising my interests before me. On either side are couples and groups: German girls on vacation, Japanese in school-uniforms, Americans consulting a Lonely Planet guide. Lonely planet, indeed. Again the lights change, again a mass of limbs and faces, an instant of emptiness and then the cars.

Reiko has turned out to be far busier than I had hoped – with her family, with her work. It has been two weeks since I saw her, since she and Kentaro had me over for a sashimi dinner. My coworkers remain distant: the Americans are utterly separate from their surroundings and make no effort to adjust, and the Japanese are submerged in their work at work and their home at home, and seem reluctant to admit me to their familiar company. I am part of neither world.

The major disadvantage separating now and the past is the introduction of distance. Before, alone in New York or Chicago or Ann Arbor, on long walks or during long silences I could pick up my phone and call home – my grandparents or parents, brother or sister. Now I must go to an international phone-booth, choose one among a row of pexiglass boxes to sit in, neither home nor in the city. It can’t be done on the move; elsewhere I could be, in a sense, with my family and also a part of the movement around me. Now such calls feel like a retreat, a giving-up in the face of what is difficult.

This is a dangerous line of thought, to be sure, and particularly so when one is in the midst of a major city, an undifferentiated mass of people, when who we are is lost in the noise and anonymity. And soon enough my thoughts, as always in these moods, turn to Rachel, the one who got away, the drug I cannot quit and the idol no creed can save me from worshipping.

It is true, as others have reminded me, that things were never perfect and were in fact deeply flawed, but this is reason and reason fails me. I look upon that time and remember fragments, no bird’s-eye view; fragments, in particular the tightness of embraces, my face in her hair and mouth upon her neck, the jigsaw fit of our hands which seemed cut from the human cloth by God himself. The elevator kisses and the reading-aloud of books, the reunions after time apart. My mind made of her a home on earth, a shelter against the elements. I struggle to remember the failures and the disappointments, to retain a balanced view, but reason fails me and is no guardrail against the abyss of loss.

…

One weekend morning in the fall I went to Kyoto by Shinkansen, the bullet-train. And I tried to focus on the characters of the Soseki novel open before me, tracing their vertical march along the page, but we were passing mountains and rivers. Finally I submitted, put the book away, and opened my journal. Again I was traveling, and the sense of adventure overcame my doubts. Japan in the window – Japan! And so on when I reached Kyoto Station, and the light of the early afternoon was bursting through the curving beams of the ceiling.

The day passed, and I found myself at Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. And there stood I between the temple and the gate, and the sky was reflected in the lily-filled pool beneath the bridge. All was much as I had left it a decade ago, on my last trip to Kyoto. Here I am, one and the same – and with me, my solitude. And the ever-present companion of my solitude: the face of a love lost, a face losing the immediacy of a recent memory and taking on instead the outlines of an idea, an unrealized dream. Enough time has passed that I can no longer recall her scent; I must travel with open sinuses and hope to chance upon it again, if it exists outside of her.

This place is unspeakably beautiful – remember that, focus on it. There is only now, this moment: and yet this moment contains all those that have gone before, and I am the story of my past. Kyoto – the temples, the mountains, the bridges over rivers, the shops and the Kansai dialect – it is beautiful, as was Bergen, as was Pisa. But the space between I and this place is not empty, nor free of troubles. There is no blank space left upon which to scrawl youthful dreams of mobility and cities and women. And there is ever a distance between here and where I wish to be.

…

February 14^th, and the days were at last beginning to lengthen. Soon the day would arrive when I could leave the office and walk beneath the still-alive sun to the station. It has been a long winter: my eyes forced open every morning by an alarm, and then the lying still and seeing the dullness of the street-lamp in the space between the blinds. And knowing I must not be still, I must rise and take my place among the moving millions. At the end of the day, again, it is dark – and though, as before, I spend my lunch hour scouring novels and poems for meaning, looking up regularly to smile at a woman who passes, still the whiteness of the walls substitutes for the day, and when I leave at six night has fallen upon the city. Thus my winter: save for lunch, a life lived under artificial light.

It was an anxious morning, and I struggled to focus and keep my mind in the cells of the spreadsheet. The markets are quiet but my mind is awake and roaring. Again: there sits the fact of aloneness, and the fact of a love that is lost. The fact gapes naked before me, and I clench my mouth and look away, anywhere away. The undertow of office-noise leaves a film of disgust upon my tongue, and with driest eyes I cannot convince my lips to smile. The conversations are terse and I am gone before anyone can ask – to the bathroom, on a striding walk about the trading floor, to the window in the corner overlooking the haze and endless buildings.

Eleven came, and I moved quickly to the elevator. Early, but not inexcusably so. I could take it no more and had to leave – the charts and lines were leaping from the monitors and blurring in my eyes. I requested the ground, and the elevator began to fall and the screen flashed its neon ads. I was sick with myself, and knew in my heart what was coming. I felt what I was to do before I did it, the thought grew in my unconscious, and the sickness of guilt arose with bile in my throat.

Anxiety: more than fear. Fear has an object, something to which it can point and therefore embrace. Fear can be faced with courage. Anxiety is another thing altogether, for it has no object and is something faceless that will never meet your gaze and be stared down. Anxiety is directed toward the non-object, the nothing, the zero that waits between lines of text and threatens to rise and swallow everything. What nothing? The nothing that, perhaps, I am; the might-have-been; the hours passing while I write this, the nothing of failure, the nothing into which our minds spin myths and gods to fill the great gaps between the stars, the space between a man and woman where love may take up residence, and then leave and again be nothing.

I knew what I was to do, and hated myself for it. And I hate myself for it to this day. Vainly the arguments rose in my mind: this is a new life, a life began anew at thirty, a break with the past and the future remade. A ray, a ray. There is no time for these old sadnesses. Life passes, winter passes and soon it will be spring.

Nevertheless, I walked with downcast eyes two blocks to McDonald’s, grabbed a fistful of napkins and a pen, and wrote:

It’s Valentine’s Day, and almost a year since you left. And even longer than a year, considering that love exists only until the moment that one or the other person for a moment ceases to believe, and the bubble pops – or even entertains the notion: I could be alone, I could be with another, the future is not yet written. One day in the aftermath of an argument you looked with fresh eyes upon another, and thought: I could be his, and problems x, y, and z would go away. And then you were lost.

Our belief in each other was absolute. Within weeks we fell in love – do you remember? We agreed to fully give ourselves to each other, to push off from shore and allow the oars to sink beside our boat. There can be no love without a leap of faith. But we are human beings and not God, and time can turn our hearts elsewhere and make us forget the feelings that brought us to where we are.

It is only human to build our houses upon the shifting sand of another’s love. The lesson of Gatsby: we found the rock of our world securely on a fairy’s wing, we attach our eternal dreams to another’s perishable breath, and it cannot be otherwise. God wears no human skin, and the comfort of religion is a cold comfort, an over-the-counter salve upon bursting wounds. God is love and love has gone. The God-shaped hole in my life is a love-shaped hole, and I peer into those depths and see us walking in tandem, hand-in-hand, or standing close and smiling upon a bridge against the river and the city while strangers take our happy picture, and the same picture so many times over four long years.

I am ashamed to be writing this after so much time has passed. But I’ve forgotten nothing and moved no further forward, and even as the linear trail of time charges into the future, my heart will not follow in its blazing wake, and stands stubborn and immobile where we left it a year ago this April.

I do not wish to disturb you – no, that isn’t true. Once, once, you would stay up late and read my writing, and you understood, and it stirred something in you. Writing that does not touch ripples upon the flatness of our comfort is not worth the page it occupies. I am ashamed and made into a beggar tugging upon your coat, but the things in our hearts will manifest themselves whether we wish them to or not, and these are things that must be written, it could be no other way.

Love always.

And I shuddered and closed the folds of the napkin-stack before I had to suffer again to look upon my sickness. And I dumped the tray of food-wrappings into the trash, and the flap flapped and creaked and I walked quickly through the revolving door and spun upon the city, and the coldness of February closed unto my skin. Walking, I affixed with trembling hands a few international stamps upon the envelope and dropped it in a postbox, and moved quickly away. Hot tears came upon my eyes, and I felt the deepest depths of shame.

The sky trembled behind buildings, Tokyo went about its business, and I burned and burned as I entered again the Goldman building and tapped my name-stained ID card against the watchful glass.

…

I check the mailbox, expecting emptiness; but no, a letter from Greg. Greg, a college roommate and now psychologist in Chicago. I had explained in my last letter my fears: that things are going well, that money is rolling in and my accounts are something to write home about for the first time in my life, that the job is satisfactory and I am in demand for my Japanese, but that I remain alone and cannot shake the feeling that my moment has passed, that I have seen the climax of my life and watched it pass.

And when I go off, evenings, into the neon districts of Shinjuku or Shibuya, to no end less innocent than a coffee and books, the temptations of the side-streets claw at me, the crowds blur together into waves and waves that beat upon my shore, I am superfluous and no one would know if I left tomorrow for Seoul or Budapest, and there would be no mail to forward to my new address.

I remain alone: and these thoughts are accompanied by other, yet sadder thoughts. Where is she? I see her name everywhere: Reiko, Ray Charles, reach, ray, lay, latch. In Japan the ls become rs, and the painful reminders are doubled. And her hair, her shape, a movement, but never she herself. I wrote all this in a letter to Greg, and said: it has been over a year, and I am afraid. Will I always carry these regrets? I once believed with all my heart that she and I were literally made for each other, our souls separated by the gods and our search for the other half was the engine of all our wandering and accomplishments. Our meeting could not have been otherwise. A part of the lex eterna, written in the stars. As in Plato’s Symposium: two halves, each aching for the other and unaware that the other walks and breathes across a lake, an ocean, a crowded room or street. And some lucky pairs find each other. But Plato had no word on what happens to those who find each other and then separate again.

I said all this, and this was his reply: First, it is understandable. A year isn’t such a long time. And second, what is happening is that you have not fully metabolized the experience. You experience what happened with Rachel as a tragedy, and there is no redemption at the end of the story. You loved her with all your heart, and she left – and the curtain falls, the end, and the moviegoers wait pissed off and disbelieving while the credits roll and no good comes of it all. Remember when we saw No Country For Old Men in college? We waited for something good to happen, something to make us believe in humanity again – and it never came. All well and good for a movie. But in life you want a happy ending.

…

After all, I am a solitary man. In my earphones, in fact, is a lonely song. I am given to moments of self-pity, as now: looking out the train window at the flashing, wire-laden Tokyo streets, music too loud. I allow my eyes to see the city as a blur, and I am a rock in the middle of the rapids – and as this moment goes, so goes my life, a scream followed by silence, and the doubting of whether one in fact heard anything at all.

The guitars pick none-too-gently at the defenses I’ve struggled to erect around my heart. Loneliness and solitude are no synonyms, but the line between them has always been fine. I look upon the crowded station at Yoyogi: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough.

And just then the doors of the train-car opened, and more kids in their uniforms and salarymen in their suits crowded on. And then: a woman. American, but no tourist – alone and dressed in a suit. With long, brown hair, and brown eyes which she proceeded to turn upon me. And my reverie passed as quickly as it had begun, and I came back to life. Smiled, turned away, and after a moment removed my headphones. There must be that intervening moment between the connection and the opening; it must appear as though each were its own, independent event.

There she stood, beautiful. And I willed my voice to speak, confidence to rise up through my body. And fiercely I thought, and trembled, and then the next station was announced and she turned decisively for the door – and left, wholly unaware of the emptiness behind her. I watched her leave, and looked at my hands, and replaced the headphones.

There was no time, after all, there had been no real window, no opportunity-.

My fingertip moved and chose the saddest song I know, and I could not will it to do otherwise: You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea. You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea.

…

Spring began to arrive, and letters. My articles and poems were being accepted quickly and reliably for the first time in my life – I’d been given a steady stream of creativity in this difficult year, and the things I wrote were thought to be worth reading. And on today’s run the air felt lighter, and I ran faster and longer than I had in weeks. Everyone on the boardwalk was a competitor, a singlet from races past, and I was flying past them, full of life and fire.

And my thoughts turned again to the future, and I knew my mistakes in my heart of hearts.

For too long I have wandered, and my feet are weary. The hills of Michigan rise to the surface of my mind; and the high school track beneath stadium lights, with my sister waving cardboard signs emblazoned proudly with my name; and the first appearances of my words in the hometown paper; and the evenings with my grandfather on the pier at Grand Haven, photographing the ever-new setting of the sun upon the lake; and that old house for sale in Fruitport, nine acres with a barn, shrouded by trees.

In a hurry, always, I stuffed the last piece of the daily in the trash and ran to catch the next train, whenever it may come. I felt the floorboards shake a bit, and crescendo, and finally the train shot across the platform and stopped sharply to pile us on. Clothes stuck heavily to our bodies and we were short of breath. It was the Northern Indiana commuter train, not the train I usually boarded, but it would stop, I assumed, at my station.

I rolled the coming night over in my mind: first, home, stopping to check the free box outside the bookstore. I would shower and then hurry to the laundromat, grab a sandwich, iron my suit and shirts, speed into bed, and still my caffeinated heart long enough to trick myself into sleep, for the next day of work would be an important one and I would need seven hours.

So it was to go, and though never quite satisfactory, this is my life. But we don’t plan on making mistakes, or getting on the wrong train and speeding off in wrong directions. I was, of course, on the wrong train, the conductor informed me: headed fast toward Gary, Michigan City, and South Bend. I pleaded with her to make an emergency stop, and as she explained there was nothing she could do for legal reasons and so forth, the appropriate stop, and my plans, blew by the westward window of the train.

Sometime between eighteen and twenty I had decided, after too many frustrated minutes in traffic and lines, that I would breathe and live also in minutes I do not own; I would somehow squeeze life out of the compressed hours that pass unnoticed as we wait for moments of action.

Waiting itself, I decided, is a skill. Passing time anyone can do, and I am far too proficient at it, and think casually across years in both directions. Time passes well enough on its own without my urging. But waiting – who, in our time, can wait? Financiers finger Blackberries with eager eyes until the morrow’s opening bell; sleepless mothers lie watchful for the children to come home; lonely men walk in shadows a block or two off the main drag, needing appetizers while they wait for love.

So I nodded, swallowed. Scenting embarrassment, the passengers in the seats around me, newspapers opened, counterclocked their iPod wheels to better eavesdrop on the scene. I thanked the conductor for her kindness and asked for advice; get off at 130th, she said, and wait. The northbound should come in an hour and a half.

130th came quickly and I stepped off the train with less resolution than usual, for once uncertain of where in ten minutes I would be, and why. The platform was new, aluminum, efficient; the sound of weary homebound shoes, and I alone (I felt) had no particular place to be, no dinner on the table.

But the station door was unlocked, though six in the evening had passed. And there was a piece of home in the simple café lazily closing inside. I sat at the bar, hearth and altar of the lonely, and ordered a tea. I loosened my tie, and the boneweary woman eyed me with suspicion and said she’d be closing in twenty minutes.

Then I looked at my phone and scrolled through the names. For some, the distance between us could be measured by days and stops on the line, for others years and compass-points – but I knew better than to linger long, and put the phone away.

There was no business especially urgent about any call I might have made, and it was in the area of dinnertime. And anyway, to pace until reminded of some matter that cannot be put off, some call that must be made – that may make the time pass. But it is not waiting. Waiting is a direct, head-on, stubborn standing up to gnawing despairs and longings of all sorts. Waiting is strong, monastic, manly – and it, damn it, was what I would do.

So I waited, writing without direction in my notebook. No events to analyze but the setting of the summer sun, red and heavy behind an industrial haze. Nothing but nonsense to fill the page: quick notes with bullet points, as I prefer when my life has stepped outside its narrative structure.

I waited. Slowly, slowly, the noise in my mind began to quiet and the first hints of satisfaction and rest settled in. And, when I could say so and mean it – after much waiting indeed – I wrote that I was pleased to have taken the wrong train, pleased that no laundry was done and that I would wear these socks again next day, and not a person but I would know.