Description
Scuttling through the undergrowth, examining the waxy green leaves of the rhododendron, seeing if the plants are an alien life-form masquerading as beings-of-this-world, I realize I am no botanist. I carry on, leather notebook in hand, and glare at the people on the asphalt loop. Young couples in matching maroon hoodies and blue jeans faded at the knee drink in the romance of the sweeping water. Fishermen kidding no one in camo, including the walleye and the pickerel frogs, stoop over the shoreline with their hands grasping straight rods. Their fingers fidget, missing the rifles secured in the parking lot. The pond looks deeper than my last visit—its belly swollen from the run-off. Around me the dampness of the melted frost has left a pungent smell in the earth, like discarded chewing tobacco. With a final glance at the water, I write reflection is an illusion and head deeper into the woods.


Characterization
A Sunday stroller—that is what I have become. Brunch first, of course. Scrambled eggs, fried spiced potatoes, steaming Guatemalan coffee. The day has become a ritual. I arrive at the restaurant at eleven, though Maria runs late. When she schlepps in, out-of-breath, mumbling apologies, we small talk. She asks how I am? How long have I been waiting? “Fine…Not long,” I say. Once the food arrives, we talk of classwork and the spiraling neuroses of our professors until the conversation shifts to my novel—the great unwritten tome. The book exists in the space I term literature of the mind. All concept, no words. The lack of a material object, of pages that I can rifle through and annotate, even edit and expand, weighs me down. Weakens me as a writer. In fiction class we are taught character springs from action. Dialogue is subterfuge. We agree that spoken language is cheap, ironic. Only action reveals the true character of a person.


Comparison
Writers commonly use Thoreau’s Walden as a rhetorical device, a means of making a point, or as an allusion to a famous introspective philosophy—an opportunity upon which to parse contemporary society. When I sit down to write I concoct new referents. Though I am not enamored by the dense ramblings of Ted Kaczynski, and I would never compare my work to the intimate observations of Aldo Leopold, I am always seeking a literary mentor. Often I have thought of Ernest Hemingway and his preoccupation with testing himself against Nature. In Green Hills of Africa and The Old Man and the Sea his protagonists are men of action. Pure character. In Hemingway’s life, as in his novels, he slays Serengeti antelope with single heart shots. Yet when he sails the Atlantic he fillets swordfish with machinegun fire. His rod impotent on the deck. He is a destroyer of beings-in-the-world and perhaps he is closer to the Unabomber than me.


Encomium
Some of Kaczynski’s ideas are interesting, provocative. The centralization of power emerges through moral decay and technological advancement. People are duped by entertainment. A return to Nature is the only answer. Several social critics agree with Kaczynski’s words, though not his actions. For seventeen years he bombed a series of Midwest and West Coast universities and also targeted airlines, slaying three and injuring two dozen. Professors, graduate students, computer store owners, and an airline president became wreckage in his assault on societal sublimation. Tree bark was attached to the bombs. A sadistic reminder of what we had turned away from. Yet his strangeness intrigues, and his blistering language—insightful, though pompous and long-winded—reminds me of the frightening qualities of prose. He wrote an essay. Cutting, whole, published. The New York Times ran the 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, to halt the carnage. Language ended his reign. His family recognized the writing style, Kaczynski’s voice.


Vituperation
“Why do you say I schlepp?” asks Maria. “I don’t schlepp.” My choice of word is an unfortunate one. Saunter, traipse, mosey, sashay would have worked, would have saved me from walk. I am ignorant of Yiddish, the culture and the language. I am dismayed by my own pathetic shortcomings. Shame has always led me to know more, to research and discover meaning. Not truth exactly, but a means of understanding the world. Yiddish, I find out, comes from the idea of Jewishness. The ancestors of the Canaanites, the Ashkenazi Jews, settled in the Rhineland centuries ago and led to the area becoming a center of Jewish intellectual and cultural thought. Like many nations, Germany has long romanticized its origins. The völkisch movement of the nineteenth-century heralded a return to the land. To purity. Then during the twelve years of Nazi control government officials and supporters of the Party manipulated these ideas, reinventing the country as a guardian against the corruption of language and race. Viewing its Aryan citizens as naturally superior, Jewish people were denoted as other: stücke, mischling, untermensch, Jüden.


Confirmation
When the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote of aletheia, an understanding of the world through our relationship with it and our naming of its parts, he disclosed us for what we are: bodies of language. In Being and Time he argues we can sense our existence through its constituent parts. I read this as language becoming a testament of reality and of our humanity. Though our individual corporeality dies off—to be replaced by our progeny—the words continue. I tell myself this is why I write, why I conceive and spin out narratives. In creating the lives of others, I reveal the story of my life. But once I am gone and the words are no longer mine, then what? The question of whether temporal existence is enough for me, for any writer, is troublesome, and illuminates the one flaw in the whole enterprise: the ego.


Refutation
Who am I as a writer? Does self-identifying dictate my behavior? Are questions in this regard even useful? I understand the debates about language shaping the mind, and vice versa, but I vary in my opinion, swinging from gregarious supporter to childish naysayer. I know Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, an intellectual who supported the Fatherland. These days his treatises are studied in philosophy departments around the world. His words are quasi-separated from the man, depending on your sympathies. But if language is part of Nature, or purely human nature, where does that leave me? Farther in the woods I spot two names carved into a shortleaf pine. Lovers, no doubt. I have no idea whether they are together still or have whipsawed apart. I only have their writing, their attempt at permanence—a rebuttal against growth and change. Whether vanity or a parry against nothingness, I too feel the sharp key in my pocket and map out on the trunk where I will start the M.