Part Four
Interlude
In the next three chapters, you’re going to think about the idea of “walking away,” in one way or another. The idea of withdrawing from it all, and how a philosophical way of life includes that kind of “movement of the soul” – and sometimes even a literal movement of the body, out of Normal World and into . . . something else. And you’re going to think about the connection between “walking away” and heading back, between withdrawing and engaging, between leaving the cave and going back inside to talk to the prisoners.
As you get ready to think about this theme, read these words by Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth was for many years an environmental activist, out to “save the world.” But he came around to a different answer to the big question, the question “what should I do.” Maybe it’s not the right answer. But it’s a different answer than most people give. And it might tell us something about what it means to do philosophy, not as a way to figure things out, to solve the Trolley Problem, but as a way to live in a world where you can’t figure much out, where the Trolley Problem can’t be solved. Here’s what he says:
I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo — that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.
What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.
But this is fine — the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.
I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.
