I stumbled on The Measure of All Things (fittingly enough, it turns out) by accident.

Plus I didn’t actually read it: it was a book-on-tape — fitting too, because I fudged “reading” it and I used an obsolete technology to fudge said “reading.” In my defense, I was looking for something to pass the time on an epic road trip to Vermont in 2003, and the guy on the back of the box of cassettes, author Ken Alder, looked like a down-to-earth, pleasant enough fellow. Plus, I’m a fan of sweeping ambition. Alder doesn’t disappoint, though I did have to listen to the book again on the way back, just because the major players are French and it was tough to tell their names apart the first time through.

The basic gist:

During the French Revolution, two guys set out from Paris in opposite directions to take a series of measurements. Their aim is to establish one infallible unit of measure throughout the world based upon the circumference of the globe itself, thereby making commerce of all kinds more regular and egalitarian and, well, global.

Long story short, one guy fucks it up and spends the rest of his life trying, in vain, to first hide and later rectify his error. After a while, the other guy starts to smell something fishy but he covers for his partner because, alas, all the numbers are in and the thing’s been carved out (literally…in platinum, no less) for everybody to see. Close enough for government work, he seems to say.

The result:

The meter, originally intended to be precisely 1/10,000,000 the distance between the north pole and the equator, is just a smidge short of that mark and will be for all time. It is, then, not linked to anything as “unassailable” as our pockmarked and, it turns out, oblong Earth; it’s just as arbitrary, just as abstract, just as man-made as measurements have always been. As we have always been. An Enlightenment Age pursuit that was supposed to prove, once and for all, the unassailable nature of reason, the exactitude of measurement, and the infallibility of the human mind did precisely the opposite. There is always a scintilla of error and erratum.

The real question:

Not so much Does it matter that the meter is a little white lie? but Who wants to live in a measurable Cosmos anyway? Pierre-François-André Méchain (not to be confused with his partner, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre) did, and he died in reckless, agonizing pursuit of that futile math.

This one is, in fact, a bona fide self-help manual.

Say what you will about that genre, but — as Eckhart Tolle has proven without a doubt — what is the Buddha if not a more original, more profound, and less synthetic Dr. Phil? And besides: I’m a child of the 1970s; my emotional seed is, for better and for worse, buried deep in that decade’s stony soil.

In this book, Real’s point is as cultural as it is personal and emotional. Self and world. Self in the world.

The question, in a nutshell, is how and why do we socialize our boys the way we do?

Why do we make so many of them workaholics? Alcoholics? Sex addicts? Emotional invalids? Why are these, in fact, accepted — expected, even lauded — adult male behaviors?

I, for one, don’t know for sure, but I do know it produces some pretty fucking appalling results, ones that every man, woman, and child has to deal with at some point or another. It’s not just about the horrors of school shootings or rape in prison, either. It’s about the tragic silence of the dinner table.

Ultimately, this book is as important for what it tells me about other people — my father; his father; Dick Cheney; Larry Flint; Tiger Woods, the NRA; hell, even NOW — as it is for what it helps me learn about myself.

Hemingway, like Ben Hogan, made work out of something that wasn’t work: in this case, Paris’s sensory playground.

God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world was as succulent as Hemingway made everything out to be?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all that discipline — all that deliberate pencil-sharpening in the chilly, bare Paris apartment, all those many slow days of sentence-craft — was more than just a transparent pose?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we didn’t know the end of the story, that he stuck the barrel of a gun in his mouth and uttered a final, damning No in the face of Life, cringing in the end from the real work of living and dying like a man?

First a confession:

There are women in the world (the idea of these women, at any rate; I very often don’t know them personally) who thrust upon me a conundrum: do I want to be them or date them?

Miranda July — with her crazy-curly bird’s nest of hair and her unnervingly large blue eyes — is a typical example of such a woman. She’s smart and funny and she makes these weird/unsettling/transcendent films and/or stories and/or art installations (etc.) that are all mainly about the quixotic drive toward intimacy in the digital age. Which is to say, she’s talented and attractive and, generally speaking, I want to make the kind of art she’s making.

See? This is a conundrum.

A hypothetical conundrum, but a conundrum nonetheless.

Then there’s this Liz Gilbert.

At first glance, she cuts a more mainstream figure than someone like Miranda July. Tall and blonde with a warm, easy smile, she could — and probably does/has done — turn heads in the produce section or at a neighborhood potluck of decent, solid marrieds with children. But read her books and look into her background and you discover, bubbling under that thin surface layer of blonde-haired, bright-eyed normalcy, there’s a magma of bravery and ambition that borders on audacity.

In her early twenties, instead of going to a wimpy MFA program (ahem), she set out for New York and soon elbowed her way into placing a short story in Esquire, which quickly yielded her first book deal. During this period, she lived and wrote the magazine feature that would eventually become Coyote Ugly, an admittedly atrocious movie about her experiences as a bartender in New York.

She’s now best known for fleeing the Land of Produce Sections and Neighborhood Potlucks — which is to say, ditching her boring and boxed-in first marriage — to circumnavigate the globe in search of any version of enlightenment she could find, be it ascetic or ecstatic, and then writing a somewhat Oprahfied bestseller about it, Eat, Pray, Love. (Now a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts, an abnormally attractive woman who [for the record] I don’t want to become but would probably want to date. Or at least kiss. In the abstract.)

In short, Liz Gilbert doesn’t want to be somebody’s parent. She’s not even sure she wants to be somebody’s spouse (though she has remarried, but that was at least partly so she could write a book about it). Mostly she just wants to be a writer. Those are things I can understand, on some level, in a firsthand sort of way.

And then, of course, she wrote this book — The Last American Man, which is, to my mind, the best thing she’s written so far.

It’s about a guy named Eustace Conway who lives a kinda-sorta early-nineteenth-century life in the backwoods of North Carolina.

Eustace’s thesis — and can we really argue with him? — is that we’re a race of namby-pantses. We can’t dig a well or make fire from sticks, much less survive in the woods on just what we can hunt and gather.

Gilbert’s thesis is a little more nuanced than that: something to do with what both America and its men once were and what they have become. Something about fathers and sons, the way they tend to hurt each other into the best and worst versions of themselves. Something about the ultimate limitations of self-sufficiency. It is, I think, a brilliant, charming, and insightful book. And, obviously, I wish I had written it.

In a way, I’d like to think I have written that book — my version of it, anyway. For what it’s worth. Etc.

Alas, I note the irony. In this, my book about American manhood (among other things), there are far fewer raccoon skins and ornery mules and wiry men building houses deep in the woods with their own calloused and able hands. Mine is the namby-pants version of American manhood. One in which I spend a major chunk of a section on (American) manhood by writing about strong, talented, beautiful women instead.

In my defense I’ll only say that the task of manhood, as I’ve come to understand it, is simply to own your victories and your failures alike and then say to the world (or at least yourself) Here I am.

There’s no such thing as Superman. (That probably goes for Wonderwoman, too.)

My father died on September 4, 1992.

Two days later, hikers discovered the emaciated corpse of a young man named Chris McCandless (that’s him up there) in a rusted-out bus that was marooned in the interior of Alaska, near Denali National Park and Preserve. Krakauer’s subsequent Outside magazine article on McCandless’s untimely (and, by all accounts, profoundly unnecessary) death led to this bestselling book and, a decade later, a film of the same name.

All of these are sympathetic accounts of McCandless and his wish to go into the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived.” As a result, McCandless’s visage has been indelibly drawn on the canvas of the contemporary American cultural consciousness. One conspicuous quadrant of it, anyway. Especially, though not exclusively, for those of us possessed of a Y chromosome.

Let me say that I must cop to a rather ornery impatience with any form of McCandless hagiography.

As Krakauer’s book clearly shows, Chris McCandless was a reckless young man in this and many, many other circumstances. He spent most of his brief adult life putting himself in harm’s way, complete with impromptu solo forays into dangerous and unfamiliar settings: down raging rivers and out into vast, lonely deserts. True to form, he started his Alaska sojourn with little more than a .22 rifle and a ten-pound bag of rice in his pack.

(To his credit, he did think to bring a tube of ChapStick^® along as well.)

None of this makes him all that extraordinary or even noteworthy. If there is one thing most young men can be counted on to do, it is to put themselves in harm’s way. In the vast majority of cases, though, a young man is reckless in the name of hedonism and, more often than not, he lives to tell the tale. In those two respects, McCandless’s recklessness was, I have to admit, sort of exceptional.

He was a dyed-in-the-wool ascetic and he died because of it.

Late in the book, Krakauer twists himself into knots trying to hypothesize what ultimately did McCandless in — was it really a simple matter of a greenhorn’s starvation, which both Krakauer and McCandless’s detractors alike seem to think tears an irreparable hole in the McCandless-as-Aesthetic-Voyager angle? Or was he felled by some moldy and/or poisonous potato seeds, as Krakauer suggests — an unlucky twist of fate that doomed an otherwise breathtaking feat of self-sufficiency? A feat of self-sufficiency that was, in fact, excruciatingly near its triumphal and life-affirming conclusion? Embedded in both hypotheses is the conclusion that Chris McCandless was truly exceptional: either exceptionally stupid and reckless or exceptionally gifted and unlucky.

But maybe all of that misses the point. Chris McCandless was a jumbled mess of contradictions: utterly self absorbed and yet desperate to be a part of something larger than himself; smart, capable, careless, and naïve; self-denying and self-indulgent.

Chris McCandless believed he was missing something.

Something essential. And rightly so. So he walked out into those woods and, yes, that was a singular act of arrogance. But people — particularly hardcore Alaskans — who castigate him as a greenhorn imbecile are surely missing the point. McCandless knew he didn’t know everything he needed to know in order to survive in this unforgiving new landscape. He didn’t put himself there despite the fact that he didn’t have all the necessary tools. He put himself there because he didn’t have all the tools.

He wanted to see if he could make it anyway.

To some, that might not seem like a crucial distinction. To me, it does.

So, then, as I see it, here’s the point of Chris McCandless, at least as it relates to the culture at large:

There’s a lot of us Chris McCandlesses out there. Out here.

One of them crashed and burned in Alaska in 1992, at the age of twenty-two, alone and hungry and scared. Most of the rest of us have crashed and burned in less lethal, more quietly interpersonal ways.

For some of us, it was a dot.com rise-and-fall and a dashed dream of vaguely defined superstardom. For others, like me, it was slowly but surely becoming disabused of the notion that all I had to do was find the right kind of woman and everything else in my life would fall into place.

Really the details are unimportant. It’s the wide scope that’s the crux of the matter.

We, the men of the so-called Generation X, took our first tentative steps into the unfamiliar territory of manhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a good many of us knew (or should have known) that we didn’t have the tools for what awaited us. Those of us who have lasted this long — which is to say, most of us — are now poised at the precipice of true adulthood, no turning back, no pretending we’re exactly who we said we were in college. From here on out, we must make an accounting of ourselves, which I take to be the most portentous Aesthetic Voyage of all.

When asked about his legendary golf swing — its perfect angles, its piston-like repetition — Mr. Hogan, how did you craft such a beautiful thing? — Ben Hogan said, “I dug it out of the ground.”

Ha.

Isn’t it just like a man to say such a thing?

Work is a beautiful and satisfying word to many of us, but only a twentieth-century man could turn a game into a glorious, mythical labor. Man becomes an unerring, implacable machine measured by the arc and roll of a little white ball. (While something or another slouches toward Bethlehem. Etc.)

Many survival case histories show that stubborn, strong willpower can conquer many obstacles. One case history tells of a man stranded in the desert for eight days without food and water; he had no survival training, and he did nothing right. But he wanted to survive, and through sheer willpower, he did survive. — from Ch. 1: “The Will to Survive”

Perhaps he tried to make a shelter out of scurrying small brown lizards.

Maybe he ate his shoelaces.

He might’ve shat pellets in the one small pool of fresh water he encountered.

Maybe he walked during the blistering day, shivered in his sleep at night.

Not knowing the proper direction, it’s possible that he proceeded to take three steps forward and four steps backward, over and over again, so that — as a contingency — he might go in at least two directions at once.

And sometimes he may have sprinted in an altogether different direction.

At the end of seven days, I can imagine him saying, aloud, to the sand, to the empty sky, If I live, who will listen to my story? Will they take it as a cautionary tale? Will they even believe it? What if they should make me into a hero?

Once, in a creative writing class I was teaching, a student said something very profound (as they often will do). She said, “You have to risk sentimentality.” That in itself is a risky thing to say in a writing workshop, where sentimentality is so often the proverbial third rail.

I think, earlier in his career, it was a third rail for Cormac McCarthy, too, even though he’s reportedly no fan of writing workshops.

Over the years, something must have changed because it clearly wasn’t a third rail when he wrote The Road, his Pulitzer-winning novel that features a father and his young son on the move, facing an uncertain fate, at what seems to be the end of the world. The book has its violences. Of course it does. It’s a Cormac McCarthy novel. It’s an apocalyptic dystopian Cormac McCarthy novel, at that. But rarely a page goes by when he’s not swinging for the emotional fences, too.

To wit:

Do you remember that little boy, Papa?
Yes. I remember him.
Do you think he’s all right that little boy?
Oh yes. I think he’s all right.
Do you think he was lost?
No. I dont think he was lost.
I’m scared that he was lost.
I think he’s all right.
But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find that little boy?
Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

This is a book that is unabashedly about loss and selfless love, how the two necessarily go hand-in-hand. In this case, literally. Pushing, together, a shopping cart full of canned goods through a cold, gray landscape. Nuturing each other anyway. Together, in spite of everything, steering toward something lasting and good, something they — we — can’t even imagine.

Jack Nicklaus’s Golf My Way is a classic of golf instruction, but truth be told, it’s pretty dumb to think any book can teach you how to play golf like Jack Nicklaus in his prime. So much of what makes any truly elite, once-in-a-generation athlete worth emulating has so little to do with anything you can put into words. It’s all about pathology, really — pathological competitiveness, pathological attention to detail, pathological confidence — and you either have that sort of pathological make-up or you don’t.

That said, there are two lessons in Golf My Way that anybody can apply to regular life:

The first one anyone, regardless of skill level, can actually use on the golf course too: that is, stop playing golf — or anything else you love to do — just before you feel like you’ve had your fill. Nicklaus writes that, even as a very young boy, he loved golf with such passion he never wanted to leave the course. There was always another bucket of balls to pound on the range or fifty more putts to sink on the practice green. He eventually learned there was value in quitting for the day even if he had the energy and interest to keep playing. He came back fresher, hungrier the next day. Like Hemingway, who stopped writing each day in mid-sentence, Nicklaus wanted to always look forward to his life’s work.

The second lesson is a little more figurative because, unless you not only play golf but are a truly excellent golfer, you really must ignore its literal application.

Nicklaus writes that it’s almost impossible to play a perfectly straight shot in golf. The result will be crooked; the trick is to know what kind of crooked the shot will be and then to account for it. That’s why he has a particular target on each shot and he tries to shape the flight of the ball every time he hits it. He aims for the center of every green and tries to move the ball one way or the other, depending on the location of the pin. If it’s on the right side of the green, he aims at the middle and tries to cut the ball toward the pin. If it’s on the left, he aims at the middle and hits a draw. Nicklaus figures that’s safest and it gives him the best chance at being on the green, even if he doesn’t pull off the shot exactly as he intended.

Again, don’t try this at home in the most literal sense: there are successful professional golfers who are incapable of navigating this approach on a golf course. While it allows for imperfection, it also requires exquisite control of the intricate, finicky system that is a golf swing.

However. There is the metaphor:

Our paths are crooked. Yes, we need to aim at something. But even the best of us are capable of flaring off into any number traps and thickets and other assorted hazards. Imperfection is a constant. Expect it. Plan for it. And — if you’re really feeling your oats — embrace it.

I have been away for a few days.

This is (something like) the view from the hotel where I stayed, but this is not my photo. [I found it on the internet.] I did not have a camera with me where I was.

[Where I was: ...... Boston ................... Writers' conference ......... It snowed, it sunned ... I was a good deal of the time very high up in the air .................... Turns out there was (once) a real man called John Harvard ...... college had a d ......... be was spelled bee ......... Birds in the hotel bar ............................ Strangers clapped politely in my vicinity ... once in my direction ............................. My phone was for a time a stranger to me: it lost itself ........................ It reintroduced itself not long thereafter ...................... (Hello? Hello!) .............................. I liked these lines: "It opens / with a stomach of sunlight -- / the lion dissolved away." ......... from this book .............................. and a three-legged dog in a sweater vest ...................... breakfast burrito ...... stuffed peppers ... Jorie Graham .......... Remy Charlip ...... maybe a hobbit or else Dudley Moore .......................................................... Etc.]

Turns out my words have become stranger too.

Or else they’ve lost themselves.

Like luggage. [Better yet: baggage.] Irony, I suppose. [Supposedly: I'm a writer. (Please see above.)] But I think I’m ready to give up searching for them (so). Words, I mean. [No word (!) on whether they're out there somewhere searching for themselves.]

This, then — someone else’s picture of a window collecting/displaying its own constellation of water drops — is what I want to offer in lieu the way of luggage language. As the summation of my being away, of what I lost and (in the losing) what I found.

Or, if you prefer (and maybe I do):

To be clear(er):

The point isn’t so much connecting the dots/drops or adding them up one-by-one to see how many you have. You just narrow in on the field of what is closest to you. [The dots/drops ≈ people, ideas, books, places, dreams, a life or lives or love. Etc.] And you let the larger backdrop blur away. It’s there, yes, but it’s not important. Not so important anyway.

What you can see is what sees you. That’s what’s important.

Or (less words, clearer, in the imperative):

See what sees you. Seek it.

Something like that is what I learned while I was away, and I was glad to learn it.