I find it ironic that to “be offline,” one must first log on and publicly declare one’s leave of absence; otherwise, you’re just a missing person’s case, if indeed anyone would have noticed.
Because how else will people know that you’re getting off your ass and venturing beyond the portal of the internet into the Great Unknown, wherein lay fields of golden grasses awaiting the press of your eager touch? How will the people hear of your temerity, your principles, your discipline? It’s why those rugged adventurer types are always spamming your feed with their beautifully-curated shots of misty mountains and “off the beaten path” fields with no one else around but themselves and their two-ton metal water flasks. And it’s why we tend to fall for it, romanticizing what it must be like to stand on a grey bluff at the edge of the world.
- “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” by Casper David Friedrich
If they really wanted to disappear into the woods and never be reached, they would have done it by now, and you wouldn’t hear a thing until the bodies are found. But they feel lonely too, as much as they insist on their independence. They don’t want you to worry, but they want you to know that they’re alone, and they’re being so brave about it, so when they come home you can be there to take them into your arms and ask about where they’ve been. Their solitude demands acknowledgement because it is a difficult thing to withstand. And suffering without an audience is not noble; it is only pain.
Not that my current hermetic existence is any pain to me. On the contrary—I’ve been planting seeds. Well, it started mostly as an accident: I did not collect the morning glory pods in time, and due to recent rains they’ve started sprouting all over the one-by-twenty foot hellstrip of dirt which I call my garden. An opportunity presented itself. Since then, I’ve cleared out last year’s overgrown weeds and started paying attention to the sages again, their tender buds peeking out of dried wood, sensing the return of their derelict master. I’ve chopped the dead tomato and left the impotent chili—yet to bear seed, though it’s been around for months—to its business. I ordered some native wildflower seeds and hope to plant them if the marigolds don’t spud soon.
I made myself some little notebooks too, out of unused scraps I’ve had laying around for a while. I spent hours tearing even pages from colored paper, measuring cardstock and gluing beautiful prints for the covers. I only got a papercut once, and not from all the actual paper-tearing; I got nicked by a label from a roll of yarn, which I’d used to crochet little tasseled ribbons to wrap around the books. They turned out so splendidly—one even had beads on the tassel and the colors matched the cover!—but when I opened my phone to show my friends what I’d done, I remembered they weren’t there. I had deleted all my apps and silenced my notifications.
All this beauty, and no one to admire it. What is joy without an audience?
—
This is not the first time I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, as some of my friends may recall. In the summer after my first year in college, I’d made it clear to everyone that I was not to be contacted until the next semester. A summer break meant a break from them; I just wanted to be with my family whom I hadn’t seen in months. I’d already spent most of my time with my classmates—why would I want to give them even more? It’s not like they would want to be around me as soon as I could no longer entertain or accommodate them.
“… I am a toy that people enjoy
Till all of the tricks don't work anymore
And then they are bored of me”
- Lorde, “Liability”
Most people respected my demands, save for one fool who was so adamant upon inviting me to a concert that I received an invitation to buy a $20 ticket via college email. That one violation of my peace solidified my resolve to protect my solitude, to guard it with the steadfast conviction usually reserved solely for the holy priests of Mount Athos.
Upon my triumphant return to society, my friend greeted me warmly, saying, “Don’t ever do that again, asshole.” She’d wanted to show me things over the summer, but I had been unreachable. Another classmate said that he would have visited me, but I believed he was just saying it. He knew it would make my heart flutter; I knew he didn’t actually like me that much.
—
What to do, then, with all this free time? Whenever I’m not dicking around on the Internet or getting injured for my passion projects, I'm usually reading something. Since I’ve been offline, I’ve drifted somewhat unconsciously towards philosophy, but nothing serious; it’s Marcus Aurelius (cliché—his word is gospel for the Independent Man).
I return to him not because he’s my favorite, or that I agree with him, but because I studied him in college. Re-reading the Meditations brings me back to that happier time when I was quick, clever, witty—back when I was still entirely woven into the fabric of the world.
I find him funny in a way that he surely never intended, nor would more serious intellectuals and “men who love the grind” see him as such. “Only philosophy,” he admonishes, can keep him “safe from assault, superior to pleasure and pain.” Hilarious guy, and a vent blogger if I ever saw one. To me, Marcus Aurelius is a philosopher in the same way a watermelon wrapped in a few hundred rubber bands is, technically, holding it together.
I asked my brother what he thinks, and he said that Marky’s got “a generally good philosophy.” He’s a Christian pastor, so of course he’d think that. Like Marky, he is a leader first and an orator second; thinking deeply is somewhere in eighth place with these guys. Gregory Hays says it best in his introduction to the new translation: ”Marcus’s logic is weak—that of the rhetorician, not the philosopher.”1 He practices the words, over and over, perfects them endlessly, but beneath it all his attitude remains the same. It must, since that is the purpose of his infinite regressions.
Contrary to popular belief (as I recall it), Marcus Aurelius was not a uniquely impressive ponderer. He was more a flagellant of the spirit, not the flesh which he so disdains. Like Hays said: “It suggests not a mind recording new perceptions or experimenting with new arguments, but one obsessively repeating and reframing ideas long familiar but imperfectly absorbed.” His travel journals were not meant to be guidelines for other people, as he is often read now, but a private record for him to daily practice his dogmas of self-effacement, beating the same dead horse until long past the time it’s become glue.
Well, I didn’t say he wasn’t sometimes relatable.
“People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can always get away from it anytime you like.
By going within.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (4.3—first half)
—
Once in a while, I would withdraw into myself. On many weekends, I wouldn’t even talk to anyone, or as few people as possible. I did my laundry, my chores, my work; I took long walks behind the campus, looking for rabbits or watching the sun set behind soft-sloped canyons and rosy bougainvilleas.
This was not at all like the second time I disappeared.
2020. Lockdown. Isolation. You would have thought that it was what I wanted. But Adam and Eve didn’t know how good they had it either, and it was a long, long fall from heaven. Over the course of that year, among the detritus of shattered plans and lost connections, I withered. I could no longer bear for anyone to see me like that. Better that they remembered me as I was—a dazzling morning star—than to know what I’d become: a bitter pit, a bottomless black hole.
Unlike the first time, there was no set date of return. I would not need to explain my absence to anyone, so I didn’t. I deleted all my accounts, sunk myself into near-total obscurity, and lost most of my “friends” this way. I couldn’t find my way back; they had already forgotten I ever existed.
“I always knew the world moves on, I just didn’t know it would go without me”
- Mitski, “Working for the Knife”
—
The impulse to disappear is neither mysterious nor uncommon. Many have gone to greater lengths to retreat from society and into the heart of nature, with more disastrous results: Chris McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp, wandered into the Alaskan wilderness and left behind some journal entries and his sixty-seven pound corpse.2 Of Timothy Treadwell, there remains even less: what little could be recovered of him and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard from a bear’s stomach.3 Again, in Alaska.
(Rest assured, readers, I am not in the Alaskan wilderness.4)
As far as I know, we cannot escape the world permanently except through death (on this, the Stoics and Epicureans agree).5 Even Henry David Thoreau, the great American transcendentalist, had to leave Walden Pond once in a while, returning to society if only to dine with Emerson or send out his laundry. (Which is not as great a sin as his detractors would like to make it seem—and has no effect on his writing.)6 Still, futile as it is, many can’t help but try.
Marcus Aurelius (color me shocked!) can lend us his well-beaten wisdom here. After all, he too was not immune to the call of the wild. Ruling an empire is a rough day’s work, with so many responsibilities to a highly-regimented society, inured to the gore and filth of his profession. I’d want to leave too. And yet, he curbs his impulse with this apt and memorable metaphor:
“Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to…? That’s what we do to ourselves—or try to—when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.
You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself from it.
But you have one advantage here. you can reattach yourself.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (8.34)
Like I said: hilarious.
Anyway, I’m not trying to separate myself from the world.7 If anything, these bouts of hermitude are what keep me here. Just as a vaccine sparks the small fever to inoculate against the larger, more devastating one, this controlled isolation—this little, temporary hiding—is my preventative against the more permanent disappearance.
Earlier, I quoted an excerpt from Marky about withdrawing within the self. What I didn’t include at the time, which I will now, is the second half: he reminds himself that there is no greater tranquility than what can be found in his soul, “So keep getting away from it all—like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic.”
We cannot keep the world at bay forever. How could we, when we live entirely in it? When we—that is, he and I—retreat from the world, it must solely be in order to rejoin it at a later time, made whole again by the protection of that inner peace.
But my soul is not peaceful, Marcus.
The problem is not, as William Wordsworth might say, that “the world is too much with” me. I don’t mean that I’m doing this because I can’t stand the news, or that I am stifled by the modern world. Nor am I suffering information overload from the Internet—nothing so trite and spineless as all that.
On second thought, it might be the opposite: I have given too much to the world, and I have nothing left for myself. There is barely any soul to retreat to anymore. Every day I feed people little pieces of myself, like crumbs of my liver in my hand for the birds to peck at. But who feeds me? Even now, I feel I must soothe and reassure the birds; it’s not your fault, because I’m the one who keeps my mouth closed.
I wouldn’t feel so empty now if I could let people in—let people replenish my dwindling stockpile of pieces with their pieces. Existing within the greater unity requires reciprocation wherever the borders of my Self meet with the Others’, but this is something I simply don’t know how to do in moderation.
I am far more selfish than people give me credit for. Sometimes, my entire being bristles against the world. I bare my teeth, rejecting everything that dares to trespass. The world presses in too close. They’ll see the fear in my eyes. They’ll watch as it bleeds into resentment, repulsion—sincere, utter malevolence.
Other times, I can’t get close enough. I feel like if I’m not careful, I could swallow other people whole, suck the marrow from the bone and lick it clean, subsume their whole being into mine until there is nothing left, not even the gore in my mouth to remember them by. Either way, it always ends with me alone.
I know I’m a burden most people cannot carry. My mother tells me all the time: whoever loves you will need to be patient and strong enough to stop you. Anything less, and you’d devour them.
To make up for all my sins, I mimic the movements of connection. I mouth the words, practice endlessly. I tell everyone to take and take from me, but when they offer to give me something in return I demur. “You can tell me anything,” but will I? Not because you are unwilling to help me, but because I am unwilling to reach out. I need nothing. I want nothing. I am here for you.
You can have my liver, but not my heart.
Of course, I could have said at any time that I was overwhelmed—I could have taken a little break to prevent this bigger one—but this would admit not only to my vulnerability but my inability to truly care for others. So instead, I take it all into myself, into the mouth of a hungry heart where anything can disappear. Even me.
Is that it, then, that I must now crawl into a hole like a wounded animal waiting to die? Maybe, if that’s what it takes to recover the person that I was, or am, when there is no audience to please but myself. I do not beg for pity, attention, concern, or love. What I really need is to be alone. To abandon my place in the world so I can see what remains and what grows back in the absence.
I’m sorry that I left some conversations hanging. I promise I’ll come back to you if you can give me this, since I rarely ask for anything else. Promise to let me leave, but don’t let go. Promise not to worry and not to forget. Promise that you’ll still be there when I return, to take me back into your arms and ask me where I’ve been.
Hays, Gregory. Meditations: A New Translation.
Krakauer, Jon. “How Chris McCandless Died.” The New Yorker, 12 Sept. 2013, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died.
Jans, Nick. “This Man Protected Wild Bears Every Day for 13 Years—until He Made the Ultimate Sacrifice.” Reader’s Digest, 14 Mar. 2019, www.rd.com/article/timothy-treadwell-bear-attack/.
"Why Alaska?” Seen as one of the few remaining “frontiers” of rugged, unspoiled Nature, it stands diametrically opposite to Western ideas of Civilization. Men will literally get eaten by bears before they address their most basic needs or interrogate unfounded preconceptions.
I still hold out hope for transmigration, but alas…
Ranalli, Brent. "Laundry!." The Concord Saunterer 29 (2021): 1-23.
PS: Listen. I know that part of why Marky insists on this “return to society” business is because the Romans really loved Civilization, to the point that they configured the world itself as one big City, and all the people its citizens. I—antisocial gremlin that I am, or whatever—disagree. It’s one of a whole list of things we disagree on, which adds to the comedic irony of me quoting him extensively here. Anyway, I am not outlining an anti-civ discussion right now! So when I say “world” in this case, I mean it in a slightly different way from how he does; my “world” concerns the people I love and the earth I live in. I couldn’t give a damn for civilization if it paid me.