Returning to the Constructed World
By Caroline Bosch
Writing 212: The Art of the Essay
Context from the author: During my freshman year, I saw a poster for ENV304 – Ethics of Wildness, a five week long summer course. Three of those five weeks would be spent in Alaska, sea kayaking and backpacking. I immediately knew I needed to take that class and go on that trip, so I signed up. In the week leading up to our departure for the Alaskan wilderness, we came to class daily for discussions of articles that we had read and wrote responses to the night before; most articles had to do in some way with the environment or climate change. We (eight students, a recent graduate, Lee Collette, and Eric Stottlemyer) then headed out for Alaska, where we spent a little over a week sea kayaking out of Whittier and another week backpacking near Seward. We each kept weatherproof notebooks with us the whole time, and wrote/sketched in them daily. When we came back and started going to class again, I felt as if I had lost something significant. Our experience in Alaska has truly impacted me in more ways than I can express, and I have grown incredibly close to the individuals I spent my time with there. I wrote the first draft of this essay after our first meeting in the classroom when we got back on campus.
Today, I woke up at 11:20 a.m. I resisted the urge to keep sleeping, felt dirty, considered showering, washed my face, and decided not to shower. I walked the little hallway back to my jail cell of a dorm room, got dressed in clothes that were not chosen based upon their warmth and dryness but upon their color and appearance, grabbed my few makeup items, and headed back to the mirror in the bathroom down the hall. All the while, in the back of my head, I knew I needed a lot more time to sit down and read, think, and write about these articles. But for some reason I still decided that I should waste the time I had and make myself look presentable. I have always thought of my presentation as an expression of myself, and since I’ve always cared so much about my appearance, I thought I should see what it felt like now to try to care again. In Alaska, I had no mirror, no makeup, four shirts, three pairs of pants, three pairs of socks, and rain gear. Comfort and warmth trumped any care for my appearance or expression of myself through material items. Despite my past belief that people could judge my character based on my clothing rather than my actual self, I have realized that it’s entirely possible, and maybe even completely easier, to know yourself and the people around you with no consideration of their appearance at all.
Around 11:50, I left my white walled room with my rust colored, battle-worn Herschel backpack that I’ve been carrying since 10th grade. It contained: two yellow weatherproof notebooks (one filled with so many words, one scribbled in on about 20 pages, both heavy with feelings), my laptop, my water bottle, my sketchbook (with sketches from Alaska), earphones, my wallet, my glasses, four dead batteries, a pencil, and a pen. I walked outside, sneezed (because light makes me sneeze), felt physically uncomfortable, didn’t entirely acknowledge that discomfort, and walked towards the library. It was warm verging on hot, and I felt an odd longing for cold, clean, fresh air. I looked at all the order and felt disorder. There are trees, but the trees look sad and lonely. They line a rectangle of grass riddled with straight white sidewalks so our human feet don’t have to trod on any real part of nature. These white sidewalks lead us to big brick buildings where we sit in classrooms with four walls and a clock that ticks at us while we try, try, try to pay attention to our philosophy professor but inevitably click on messages that pop up, glance at Facebook and Instagram, search random articles on google, look at airfare prices, and absorb maybe 25% of what is said in class. We get up, put our big screens in our bags, take out our little screens, and check the same things on those devices, just in case there’s anything new. Or, just to avoid eye contact and conversation with our classmates who we barely know.
I walked towards the library and saw bright yellow caution tape, and people wearing bright orange vests, and machines, and the table outside that I like to do my homework at before class contained within those bright yellow lines and inhabited by the bright orange people. I felt lost. I walked into the library and sat in Starbucks, where I often sat during freshman year and pretended to study, but actually looked at art online while listening to music. I pulled up the articles, and started reading Abram’s. I read a few words. Didn’t absorb them, and read them again. I moved onto the next words, kind of absorbed them, and moved forward again. I read this article at a snail’s pace and felt so disoriented by all of the sounds around me– the humming of the radiator, the sounds of women’s voices below me, the jazz music playing over all of it. I stood up and walked into the atrium. I headed right for the blue bench on the side next to the huge window, because I craved natural light. I sat down, and started reading again, this time without music plugged into my ears. I absorbed a little bit, wrote down some quotes that resonated with me, and realized class was in 30 minutes. I heard men upstairs listening to unpleasant music loudly and drilling into walls. I thought about what they were building or fixing, and wondered if I would even notice a difference. I pulled up the Doerr article. I worried about reflecting on these articles for you, Dr. Stottlemyer, because I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care. I cared, but my mind was a mess, and it was certainly not centered enough to get anything worthwhile down, and if I had written anything, I would have been embarrassed to waste your time and mental effort reading it. I read the Doerr article about the internet’s nagging presence in every aspect of our lives (“Am I Still Here?”), and I loved it, but it made me sad. I hated it, really, because it was true. And there’s so much to say about it that there’s nothing to say at all, because it’s life. His life is my life is your life is everyone’s life around here, because we’ve been sucked into this vortex that destroys our ability to reflect, feel, love, and just think.
So, at 1:00, I rose from that blue bench, and walked down the steps from the library with my backpack on my back and my laptop in my hands, and felt so wrong. I felt like myself inside an alien body. I looked ahead of me and saw a path I had walked hundreds of times, at every hour of the day, and felt out of place. I don’t feel the need to walk on these paths anymore, to sit inside and read typed words on lit up screens that are probably the reason I have to put glasses on my face to see things a little bit clearer. I felt the clatter of my sandals on the steps of the stairs up to the third floor of Tribble. I thought about all of the times I had walked up these stairs just three weeks before, and how different it is now, and how weird it would be to see everyone’s faces in the same exact seats as before we left wearing normal clothes and with maybe even some makeup on, and opened the door, and walked into the classroom, and sat down, and looked around at everyone. I apologized to you for not writing a reflection, not because I thought you would be upset, but because I had so much to say, and I hadn’t had the time or the space to say it. I refrained from explaining any of this. We meditated. I closed my eyes and heard Lilly breathing next to me and smelled Marshall’s fast food and heard the clock ticking behind me the whole time, reminding me that time is something we live by here in this fucked up world. I heard drilling somewhere in some part of this building. I felt an intense frustration for EVERYTHING, for myself, for the fucking construction, and the fact that I could not ground myself. I could not just walk away from the group onto a patch of grass on a hill and look around me and feel like a part of something. I couldn’t hear the wind blowing, feel the mosquitos trying to suck my blood, feel the ground beneath my feet, or understand peace at all in this environment.
I listened to everyone speak. About what they had felt in Alaska, what they felt now, what they feared they would or would not feel in the future. I heard Jameson open up. I heard Marshall and his optimism and felt confused, because yes, we all know Alaska was beautiful and we all know we had unbelievable experiences there, and we are not sad that we had them, but rather deeply saddened by the absence of it all now. I heard Jordan speak yet again about her involvement in Outdoor Pursuits and her love for the wilderness, felt a tinge of anger for her constant reminder that I hadn’t been accepted to this weird group of people that loved the environment yet exclusively loved the environment, and was reminded of groups and exclusivity and society and the fucking anxiety that comes with being here. I felt something well up in my chest, and knew that my waterfalls for eyeballs would soon let down their dam and I would cry in front of everyone without saying a word about why, because I didn’t want to be crying here in this sterile space, and if I had spoken, it would’ve all flowed out in a snotty, wet mess. I tried to listen to everyone and it just made the lake inside me feel even heavier. I heard Maclane talk about getting through the day just to get through the next day, and broke, because I vividly remembered years of my life filled with days of staring up at clocks and calculating the hours left before I could start over and calculate the hours left and start over again. I am terrified of that becoming my reality again. I don’t want clocks to dictate my life. I don’t want to be so void of whatever it is I need to feel at peace with myself that I wish I didn’t even exist. I want to feel as full as I felt on that mountain with everyone lying next to me, listening to Holocene. I want to always feel like I’m in that van with the INFPs, cherishing our silence and the music and the mountains around us. I don’t want to ever feel empty again, and I am so terrified, because it’s inevitable. This week will end, my week with Jack will end, my week at home will end, and I will be on a plane headed to Winston-Salem yet again, and it will all crush me. Jack will get on a plane and fly 3,922 miles away from me. I’ll be bombarded with work. I’ll wake up and be too upset with myself to get out of bed, and waste half my day laying there and feeling horrible and wanting to get the fuck out of my bubble but being unable to, because I can’t just drop everything and live in Alaska.
A word from Caroline
Before I took WRI 212, what I knew of writing consisted mainly of academic essays — rigid, impersonal pieces filled with cited facts that I could pump out for a class, but which provided me with no satisfaction. I knew writing could be fluid and emotional, but I wasn’t sure that was a reality for me. I assumed my college career would consist of more typical research papers and dispassionate essays.
The Art of the Personal Essay truly changed my perspective on writing. I realized that what I considered to be my “crazy” emotional ramblings in notebooks could actually be formatted into essays that other people could read and empathize with. I loved reading everything Professor Smith assigned us, and I was inspired to turn my thoughts into comprehensive and artistic pieces.
It was a coincidence that I happened to have just gotten back from my trip to Alaska over the summer when I began to take this course. In Alaska, I kept notebooks with me and filled them every day with anything that came to mind. I wrote down what happened, and I would reflect upon those experiences through writing. Sometimes, that meant a few jotted down sentences in shorthand, and sometimes I found myself writing out longer paragraphs that could end up taking me back to my childhood.
The first draft of this essay was written simply as a form of emotional release when I arrived back on campus after my trip to Alaska. It was before I began taking WRI212, and it was simply a journal entry after a frustrating class back in Tribble Hall. I vividly remember spewing all of the words out onto my computer screen. That first draft was a piece that came right from my heart, and I typed so fast to get everything out before I could forget how to express the anguish that I felt as a result of coming back to civilization. I have never had a piece of writing come out so fluidly before this, and I was surprised about how clear my feelings were when they were expressed through written words.
I sent that journal entry to Dr. Stottlemyer after writing it, and then I forgot about it. When we were given our first assignment in WRI 212, the Senecan letter, I realized that I could format this reflection into something more. The essay was meant to “follow the movement of the writer’s mind in thought.” I felt that what I had spontaneously written in a vulnerable state applied perfectly, and I wrote another draft.
I’m so glad I was able to find a genre of writing that I feel connected to and inspired by. This essay feels like a true representation of my thoughts and their movement through my mind, and taking a course that allowed me to explore my own mind and be vulnerable was something that truly changed my image of writing and inspired me to continue writing personal essays in the future.
From Professor Carter Smith
Assignment
Adapted from an assignment sheet composed by Ryan Shirey.
For our first essay of the semester, you will explore a particular form of the personal essay that follows the movement of the writer’s mind in thought: the Senecan letter. Just as Seneca amplifies the particulars of his life to examine their significance and to arrive at a kind of point for his audience, an essayist in this form analyzes something familiar—an incident, concept, place, or text, for example—as a jumping off point for a deeper exploration of his or her own thoughts on a larger idea. For this essay, I want you to imagine your audience as Seneca does: not as an abstracted audience of strangers, but as a particular person with whom you have a relationship. You get to choose the topic here. Explore it through your writing in light of the styles and techniques you have observed in other essayists’ works.
Make it exciting and impressive and great.
Professor Commentary
As a teacher, I like this assignment (I can say so because I straight up stole it from my colleague Ryan Shirey) because it asks a writer to think very specifically about the personal essay’s relationship to its audience. Seneca, whose letters we read leading up to the assignment, writes to a specific person, not an imagined, general reader. Writing within those constraints challenges you to shape the particulars of your experience into something that might matter to a real person; the specificity of address forces you, in the best cases, to say something true. That kind of unguarded honesty is what I, as a reader, respond to most in this essay. I remember pretty clearly the small workshop in which Caroline first presented this piece. We didn’t have many suggestions—we just kept coming back to those moments that felt so right. I think that Caroline said that she wrote it quickly, and no doubt one senses that in the force and urgency of the prose here. I didn’t say so at the time, but it occurs to me now that our workshop might have been an occasion to say something about the difference between work that has to be made, labored over (and that is perhaps one of the reasons to teach writing as a skill and craft) and work that is given (by what? by whom?) like a kind of dictation. If we didn’t have much writerly advice to offer that day, within the context of our writing class, maybe as readers we sensed that this essay falls into that second category.