There is No End to Williamstown

I went on vacation last weekend. Here is the schedule of things that I was under an obligation to do in the week immediately leading into last weekend:

Class: Monday, 630-830 (CANCELED)
Class: Tuesday, 620-820
Class: Wednesday, 330-530

So you might think it's idiotic that I should decide to take a vacation, and I might say: you are right. But I went on vacation anyway: I took a bus, on Friday morning, northwest to Williamstown Massachusetts, a place that I have been at least a little in love with since I went there as a side trip once in the late 1990s, on a family vacation to Boston, and my father took us to Colonial's Pizza which (prepare to have your mindgrapes squashed, Williams alumni) was at the time on Spring Street. I think it's important -- and important as a bookish person, no less -- to describe Williamstown as a place I have been at least a little in love with since the second Clinton administration because it is also the only place in the history of the world that I have found whose architecture and whose nature I found especially conducive to capital R Reading and capital W Writing.

"It would be no small advantage," Thoreau said, "if every college were thus situated at the base of a mountain." This is the ice-breaker of Williams commencement speakers from time immemorial (or at least time back to Thoreau, which, face it, is not memorialized properly). I have no idea if this is true, and I know of no possible way to test whether it is true; I find it even harder than this to determine whether finding out if it were true in any measurable sense is worth a damn. Would it be so great if we proved that it were less of an advantage to be located in smaller hills? Or on plains? I doubt it. But I can't care about that. At some level -- and I hate people who leave it at "some level", so let me offer the unpalatable but factual counterclaim, "my level" -- at my level, it is absolutely an advantage to have your college at the base of a mountain, because it is my mountain. When I realize that the bus that I'm on is going up -- not just west or north, but UP -- my heart, as silly as it sounds, goes up. The mountains, the mountains, yeah, I greet them with a song.

My big plan for my ersatz vacation was to go to the mountains and sit there reading a whole hell of a lot of Judith Butler, who writes on things like indefinite detention and precarious life, and Jacques Derrida on metaphors, and I read a fair bit from them, for my classes, for what I'm doing just right now. But I also brought, as a sort of off-hours plan -- a vacation plan -- Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, to read for fun. And because I am, I guess, perversely more committed to anything I'm doing for nominal fun over anything I'm doing for nominal work, the only one of the many books that I brought (mostly for work) that I finished was A Moveable Feast. That book is a book a person living with very little money in Paris in the 1920s, but more universally it is a book about a person who is a writer, and why he wrote at a particular time in his life, and the circumstances surrounding him as he did so. And of course, this is the part with which I fell in something like love. Bolstered and given breath by his place, Hemingway bets and eats and discusses, but more than anything else he WRITES. The thing he comes up with is The Sun Also Rises. Which is pretty damn good. Pretty incredible, really.

The work that anyone has to do is the work they have to do, and there are going to be people sitting around wondering whether or not the work has got done. There are people -- people whom I quite like -- who had a very vested interest in determining whether or not I had got through all of my Butler, or all of my Derrida. The work in front of you is going to sit there and get done or undone forever, and the accidents of your life are going to adjust themselves exactly as they should, relative to this sort of thing. But there is, of course, a thing that is not an accident; there is a thing that you can make into your work that no one is going to look at, and that is what you can WRITE. So write when you see your mountains that you've loved for all of your life that matters a damn; write when you see flatness that is all you've ever come to expect; write when you've got nothing else to do to situate yourself between the buildings that make up your landscape. But you've got something in front of you, or that you can get in front of you that, for Christ's sake, you can write about. Write it down. Make words out of the accidents you've got. It's what they are there for. And Williamstown is a moveable feast.