finding virtue in retreat

Mark Greif is an incredibly smart writer. His book Against Everything - a collection of his essays from the past twenty years or so - took me over four months to finish because a) it is so smart, too smart even and b) my capacity for consistency has been eroded and mashed into a fine pulp over these last fifteen months.

Greif, who founded the literary mag n + 1, is all the more impressive for his ability to render the lowbrow highbrow without a whiff of condescension, as well as his capacity to write essays decades ago that not only hold up today but are eerily prescient, like that old family video you have from 2004 where your uncle miraculously predicts the meteoric future growth of podcasts. But above all, Greif has that uncanny skill, the skill possessed by so few people and even fewer writers, to write simple truths that feel resonant on a personal level. Truths that feel almost as if they were written for you alone.

If you'll excuse me a quick detour.

When I was eleven years old, my younger brother, Owen, died. He drowned on a family rafting vacation in an isolated stretch of river on the beige Colorado-Utah border. It is no exaggeration to say that every element of who I am, every decision I make and every impulse that governs the legs beneath my body and the neurons firing within my brain, can be traced back to that sunbaked, miserable day on that forlorn spit of the Green River.

To endure a trauma so vast, at such a young age, shapes you. There's just no way it doesn't. In my case, it rendered me particularly risk-averse, lest I subject my parents - they of the recessed eyes and years-long inability to contort their facial muscles into a smile - to anything else unbearable. It made me more deferential to authority than I often wish I were, inclined to elevate and advance the interests of others over mine (originating from a desperate post-accident need to protect the fragile integrity of a depleted familial unit), and, as I have recently realized, a bit too nihilistic. It also made me for many years unable to cry and to this day, reluctant to let anyone in too close, especially romantically. In short, it made me retreat from much of life.

My favorite of Greif's essays isn't his searing, sardonic analysis of our society's hypersexualization of youth, nor is it his rather ridiculous description of his silly efforts to teach himself how to rap. Instead, it's an essay titled 'The Concept of Experience,' which I read as an effort to interpret what exactly it is we're meant to do with our limited days on Earth and the various devices or techniques we employ to make it all hold meaning. The urge we all feel, in one way or another, to experience. It's a great essay, an intimate essay, and his juxtaposition of two battling methodologies - aestheticism and perfectionism - is much too brilliant for me to capture here without disrespecting his work. But there's a passage within that I'd like to excerpt below (hope that's ok, Mark). It has lingered with me for many months, simmered just barely below the surface of my roiling mind, and returned with new dimensions time and again. Greif, using Flaubert as his window into aestheticism and Thoreau as his perfectionist counterpart, writes:

"Each knew nature deeply, but as something one had to go back to, whether in deforested and railroad-transformed Concord, where Thoreau could watch the trains running near his cabin, or in Flaubert's provincial Normandy, which looked to Rouen and Paris for instruction in the new modes of life. The random, premature, and unnecessary deaths of close siblings, at the dawn of the triumphant age of modern medicine - by tetanus from a shaving nick for Thoreau's brother John, by puerperal infection for Flaubert's sister Caroline - made the brevity of life more urgent, possibly, even than we feel it to be today. So Flaubert and Thoreau withdrew, to Croisset and to Walden, to try to figure out how to survive their time."

I am all too familiar with withdrawal or, as I prefer to call it, retreat. It was how I survived my brother's death. For me, retreat assumed a myriad of forms. Sometimes it was making up tired excuses to avoid my girlfriend's pleas that we spend more time together, other times liberal marijuana usage that rendered the aggressive acceleration of the mundane congealed and lazy, and in one particularly grim adolescent chapter, a dark, all-consuming Farmville addiction. But nothing ever checked the box like retreating into nature. An open, sun-speckled field, a pine-surrounded cabin where the landowners insisted on reminding me that I was technically trespassing, Vermont's wooded glens - these were the places where I could exhale, grieve without reserve.

Retreat inherently scythes away the extraneous and the superficial, allowing for that rarest of things: clarity. So does nature. When you're admiring a Redwood that climbs higher than even the largest of human egos, things fall into line. Perspective arrives. I know that immersion in nature is how I retreat - it's one of a couple things, apparently, that Flaubert, Thoreau and I share in common. But I also know, having watched this past year, that we all have the capacity for retreat, in our own ways, and that indulging that capacity has delivered unto so many a wonderful sense of grace. Sorry for singing such a Biblical tune but it's true.

Since March 2020, when the headlines grew bigger and scarier and Andrew Cuomo suddenly got hot and then, mercifully, became very not hot, we've had retreat collectively imposed upon us all. We've retreated from the workplace, from social interaction, from democratic norms, those with privilege from the cities we used to inhabit, and we've retreated from the versions of ourselves that existed pre-pandemic. The most important word in that Greif passage is 'survive.' Retreat is rarely a choice - and when it is, a luxury - but more often a matter of survival, a device employed only when there is no viable alternative. One retreats only as the final battlefield resort. And so many of us have indeed retreated as a matter of survival throughout this wretched year, for which we must of course be absolved of culpability. In the face of societal crisis, confronted by mass death, governmental abdication, an economy stark in its inequity, and public health guidance to essentially hibernate, was retreat not the only rational response?

But now, the bars are reopening and they're offering $4 margs. There has been talk of a 'slutty summer,' which will likely result in more than a few plus ones tagging along to the myriad of family reunions already on the calendar. We all want to see each other, laugh with each other, lick each other. Retreat is anathema to our resurgent, imperious post-pandemic psyche, when all so many of us intend to do is unfurl and travel wherever the winds of summer carry.

I know that by now, we all resent retreat. How could we not? It's much too easy, the throughline so direct, to associate retreat with pandemic gloom. And yet we would have to be blind to fail to recognize all that retreat has bestowed upon us. Interspersed with the depression and alienation of these past months has been a vast creative outpouring, an incredible release of art and writing and music. I know so many people who, gifted with unprecedented amounts of unstructured time and geographical freedom, have explored new hobbies or reignited old ones, who have finally had the time to peer inwards and find answers to questions they didn't know to ask. Armed with clarity, so many have recalibrated, honing in on facets of themselves that they wanted to augment while allowing others to fall away. Some have even managed to finally mourn and process trauma long-ago calcified. Isn't that something to cling to?

I'm back in nature this summer.  Rendered possible by privilege, cajoled by an ending lease and a recent breakup, I have found myself untethered as much by circumstance as by choice. As I sit once again in my parent's home in upstate New York, savoring that same compulsion to be back in nature as Thoreau and Flaubert before me, I also find myself grappling with the question of how to best survive my time. The 'brevity of life [made] more urgent' that Greif describes feels especially pertinent as COVID-19 gently fades away (please) and I cannot help but wonder if retreat itself can offer the means of living a better life.

There's a lot of pressure, rising with each report of decreased infections, to shake loose the shackles of retreat and emerge into this new maskless world without reservation. That's not a bad thing - we've spent too much time indoors and alone. There needs to be a balance; new relationships should be forged, ridiculous efforts at flirtation attempted, mistakes made. But all of us, in one way or another, have found solace within the retreat, discovered that it revealed multitudes within us, and we could certainly stand to gain from a continued plumbing of the depths to uncover what else might live in the not yet seen. Flaubert and Thoreau had to withstand vast trauma to chase the virtues offered by withdrawal and so have all of us, albeit on a collective scale. It would be a waste to retreat, wholesale and with abandon, from the retreat.