Today in South Florida it's the first day of school, the first that will not end with the question, "How was your first day of school?"
The first man and the last woman I talked to last night at Hania’s Penn alumni gathering mentioned Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The man was from Macedonia, now living in Key Biscayne, and told of his family vacation this summer to Switzerland. “We’d travel three hours and everything would be different,” he said. “Landscape, people, culture. Here you drive five hours to Jacksonville and it’s all the same.”
The woman was from Turkey, now living in Oslo. She expressed skepticism regarding the claim that Norwegians are among the happiest people in the world – a nation of self-contented non-strivers. “People ask you if you’re from east Oslo or west Oslo,” she said, making it sound a bit like Manhattan.
The last person I spoke with, class of ’72, had taken sociology with E. Digby Baltzell, the man credited with popularizing the term WASP. “He’d lecture in a hall in front of 200 students,” the man said, his mind drifting back to those exalted days in west Philadelphia.
My advice to all of you: Get outta here. The economy is still a mess, jobs are scarce, your parents love you but they've rented out your room. (Told you things were bad.) So it’s the perfect time to leave the country for a while. Stay away at least a year; you’ll miss the last pathetic leg of the race for president (don’t forget to send in your absentee ballot) and four seasons’ worth of bad television. Travel far enough and you’ll never hear the name Kardashian. Go alone and you’ll discover what it’s like to fend for yourself, and you’ll be less likely to obsess about home and more inclined to embrace the Other. And don’t wander around aimlessly; pick a place, settle in, learn the language, absorb the culture. To support yourself, get a job (it’s a lot easier when you’re not thinking about your resume): wash dishes (it’s how George Orwell started out) or pick grapes (ha! who's the illegal immigrant now?) or teach English (and get to know your own language too). You’ll be initiated into how people in another part of the world live and work and eat and think. Then when you come back, even if the country isn’t in better shape, you will be.
At the Biltmore last Friday, my friend David reminisced about his days at Columbia University in the late 60s, when he majored in English and had as professors Lionel Trilling and Edward Said.
Said had the class read books by Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, etc. "And every one of them," David said, "was about a deteriorating marriage." Said was going through a divorce at the time, David explained, and his lectures were brilliant.
Students who took the course the following semester found it disappointing. "He had gotten a divorce," David said.
One of the great things about speaking to high school students is that it dispels any doubts you might have about the younger generation. At least that has been my experience with my visits to my friend Joe Walpole's classes at Miami Lakes Educational Center.
True, the students he has me talk to are in The Cambridge Program, so they're above average. Yesterday I told them how I started in journalism at the Trenton Times by making a joke of a job application. ("What was your last job?" "Working on a farm." "May we contact your last employer?" "Sure, if you speak Alsatian.") A few of them were studying journalism, and I thought that this was a good lesson in the importance of being different. Newspapers as we know them may disappear, but not an appreciation of originality.
I also told them the love story that resulted in my first book. They listened with bright, eager, engaged expressions. They laughed at my jokes. They asked intelligent questions. "When you come back from a trip with lots of material, how do you decide what you're going to write about?" "What's your writing process?" "How do you handle rejection?"
Nobody asked the usual: "How many countries have you been to?" Or, "What's your favorite country?" South Florida students have a worldliness that will serve them well as they go through life. I asked how many spoke a language other than English and most of the hands in the class went up. They were already way ahead of me when I was their age. I had been invited to inspire them, and they ended up inspiring me.