Leaving Sheffield

When I got to Quito, Ecuador in 1996, I hated it.  HATED it.  It was my first experience in a 3rd world city, and it was busy, maddening, crowded, unkempt, and dirty.  Thick pollution everywhere.  It had no mass transit system beyond buses that still used leaded gasoline.  So the busy streets would be filled with heavy black exhaust smoke that turned your collar, canvas bag, and mucus a dark grey.  God knows what it was doing to your lungs.

And then when I was leaving 10 months later, I remember walking the streets of the beautiful, appealing, lively Quito I had come to know at love.  The steep, hilly streets had charm, the neighborhoods had a raw aliveness that I had never known in the states.  I don't know when it happened, but the city turned itself inside out until it was one of my favorite places that I didn't want to leave.

This happens to me all the time.  I hated college for my first year and a half, and when I graduated I loved it so much I wouldn't have traded it for any school in the world.  When I first got to Tanzania I realized that there’s a third world in the third world, and I was in a place far poorer than Ecuador.  I was out of place, overwhelmed, overheated, and resisting everything.  And when I left ten months later I cried as if I was leaving a family member.

And now I'm leaving Sheffield.  When I first got here it was a grey, dull, failed industrial town with no charm.  It was overcast all the time, it had none of the beautiful architecture of Bath, it had none of the culture of London, and it claimed Def Leppard as one of its sons.  But now, 15 weeks later, I’m leaving a city I love.  The streets are home, the industrial sectors have their own gritty style, and the whole town exudes the pride of a post-industrial survivor.  I spent 4 hours today in my U.K. hometown trying to find a t-shirt that said Sheffield on it.  (They don't exist.  I had to settle for a mug.)  Sheffield, now, to me, is beautiful.

So is Sheffield objectively beautiful or not?  For me it wasn't and then it was, even though none of the concrete details changed.  Is beauty only a subjective thing?  Does such subjectivity mean it can subjectively change within an individual mind?  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then how do you explain the "beholder" finding something ugly and then beautiful?  Do we have any control over this?  Could I have worked hard to see the beauty in Sheffield when I first arrived?  Or do I have no agency over these perceptions of beauty?  If beauty is up for grabs in my capricious mind and a city can transmute from ugly to beautiful (and maybe back again), then is anything actually beautiful "out there" outside of our own heads?

Sigh.  Questions for another day I suppose.  Back to leaving Sheffield.

When I first heard I was placed in Sheffield, I felt the acute loss of London, where I originally thought I would be.  And London is great--undoubtedly one of the premier cities in the world.  There's ALWAYS something happening that you're dying to see.  I'm here in the U.K. to study a very narrow field of academia and education (teaching ethics to high school students), and even within such narrowness London had something related happening all the time:  a conference one day, a lecture the next, a class the following day, etc.  I once planned to be there for just a couple of days, but then kept adding days because I there as always something else to see.  You never leave London because you're done with it:  you have to just abandon it and miss the rest of the goings on.

And yet, and yet.  London is a tourist’s paradise.  I would conjecture that Big Ben is the most photographed thing in the world on any given day—the city is awash in foreigners, and many of them are in front of Big Ben clicking away.  The Tate Modern, The Eye, the National Theatre, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Globe Theater--you could spend a month there on these tourist traps alone.  As great as these places might be, isn't there's always something a little flat, a little dead, a little over about these places?  As always, David Foster Wallace said it better than any other human possibly could.  After attending the Maine Lobster Festival, he muses:

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

So no, I didn't live in London.  I never went in The Eye, never went to St. Paul's Cathedral.  Never saw a Premier League game, never took a boat down the Thames.  I wasn't opposed to doing any of those things, I was just in Sheffield at the time.  And when I find myself regretting that I missed those classic London experiences, I'm consoled by the fact that I was in Sheffield, a very real place that was just going about its business, and I happened to be there.  I hardly heard another American accent the whole time I was here.  The British Rough Guide is 1,000 pages long, and it devotes exactly two pages to Sheffield, even though it's the 5th biggest city in England.  Sheffield was a better, realer place than London would have been.

And I can't tell if this is selfish or affectionate, but in an important way Sheffield is mine.  The Globe Theater is everyone's, but Carl at The Last Chapter bookstore on Rustling's road is mine, and I got to talk to him most every day.  The grey skies, the abandoned foundries, the losing records of the soccer teams, all mine.

Why do we love the scarred and the skewed so much?  Why is the bastard child on Game of Thrones our favorite son?  Why will I leave with more pride about being a temporary Sheffieldian than if I had been a temporary Londoner?  Who knows.  But when something is yours and you commit to it, it becomes inevitable and inextricable.  It’s the way of a parent’s particular love for their children, as described by Andrew Solomon:

"But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined?  If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children--brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished--I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter."

USA 1, England 1

Here's the very best part of being American:

We still have wild landscapes to visit.

Not that many wild landscapes, but at least we've got some.  Sure there's less than .01% of the original prairie left in Illinois, and Bill Cody killed over 20,000 buffalo all by himself, and we've cut down over three quarters of the original forests.  But in England it's far worse.  As an Englishman would say, you can't go anywhere without seeing the hand of man.  Every last bit of land has been stitched up, turned over, cut down, groomed,  replanted, shorn, paved over, built upon, remade, retooled, and redone.  That's what happens when western civilization settles in for centuries.  Think about it:  where has civilization been the longest?  Iraq.  What did Iraq used to be?  A forest, the land of milk and honey.  What is it now?  A desert.  That's where we're all heading, given enough time.

But for now, the young 200-year-old U.S.A. still has places like the Wind River Valley in Wyoming, where people leave footprints and take pictures and nothing else.  It's a place where the rocks, mountains, trees, and animals are still intact, for miles and miles.  The national park I know best in England is the Peak District--and I use the term "park" lightly.  What does this national park have in it?  Paved roads, houses, pubs, walls, farms, a North Face, a swimming pool, a grocery store, coffee shops, parked cars, and a train station.  That's as rustic as it gets.  In the U.S. we've still got some untouched places, and we've also got variety:  deserts, snow, sun, scrub brush, plains, forests, big mountains, medium mountains, small mountains.  In England they like to tell you about how different the landscape is from north to south, but it's about as different as northern and southern Wisconsin.  

And the countrysides have got to be a part of a nation's mindset.  In America we've always had a place to escape to--we kept heading west, and when that was settled (stolen) we decided to just move from city to city when we wanted.  And at the very least, we can always head out to some kind of wilderness if we want.  In England?  No way.  Your mind doesn't roam across possible landscapes--you're always "cabined, cribbed, confined" as Shakespeare wrote.  The whole country has been locked in like this for centuries, and the idea of escape isn't passed on because the elders and the elders' elders have been swaddled in this island papoose for a long time.

But maybe the eternal frontier isn't always a good thing.  Outer space is the only frontier where the U.S. hasn't stolen something from somebody (so far).  But across the American west?  We stole, murdered, killed, genocided, infected blankets, the whole sordid story.  We started living in someone else's house without asking.  It's rather rude.

And there's another reason the eternal frontier might not be a good thing, but we have to backtrack for a moment.  As I've said before, I'm regularly amazed by the intelligence of the average Englishman.  I play back my interviews and marvel at the articulacy, the vocabulary, the depth of the ideas, the deep critiquing--all amidst my own halting, lumbering questions in a thick American accent.  (Oh who can invent a device to erase the questioner's voice from an interview!!)  And this intellectual streak in the English exposes the anti-intellectual streak in America.  How else do you explain our Republican Party?  The Tea Party?  The U.S. is a country where more people believe in angels than they do evolution.  In England they put Darwin on their money.  Only 40% of Americans see global warming as a serious threat.  To be as unenlightened as America is takes effort, a kind of commitment ignorance, a strange pleasure in knowing nothing.  

Which leads us to the question:  does American anti-intellectualism have anything to do with our eternal frontier?  If escape is an essential part of our psychology, does it contribute to our aggressive ignorance?  When we were settling the west did we forget to read books?  Did we have to shut down our ability to think and reason because if we didn't, we couldn't for a second justify what we were doing to the Native Americans?

One of the greatest American comedians of all time was Bill Hicks.  Most every comedian I like today is derivative of him in some way, and a couple comics still outright steal his stuff.  He was virtually unknown in America--he was too smart, too sharp, too penetrating in his dissection of foreign policy, too biting in his critique of the consumerist machine.  Where did he achieve his fame and play to sold out theaters?  England.  That's another problem with anti-intellectualism America:  you miss the very people that could have saved you.  They were right in your midst.

It's Overcast Today Part 2

O.K., so I've taken my shot at the overcast weather. Hope it didn't sound suicidal or anything. But I can pull us back from the brink. Humans can get used to pretty much anything, and yes, I've gotten used to endless overcast days. Came to accept it.

Even came to crave it.   Here's why: When it's overcast, you get a lot done.

We've all felt this way. Think back to when you were a kid and it was a rainy day, and you weren't at school or anything, so you had the whole day to play. Didn't you get that really ambitious, creative, constructive feeling? The one where you suddenly wanted to take on a big project: build a Lego town, design your own board game, write a story, create an elaborate scenario with your dolls and action figures. And you’re kind of glad it's raining because you're supposed to be inside doing this.  If it was sunny you would feel obligated to enjoy the sunshine and summer or something.

On most days here in Sheffield I have a whole lot to do, stuff that I look forward to: a full platter of reading, writing, interviewing, and thinking. I'm eager to leave my flat, get to the university library, and hunker down to work. But if I step outside to the rare day of blues skies and sunshine, I'm now actually disappointed, thinking "damn, now I have to stay outside today and walk everywhere and go to the botanical garden because it's so beautiful out, and I won't get anything done."

And maybe that's why England and Ireland have such great literature. For me, this is will always be the very best feature of the U.K.: their love for words and wit and poetry and prose and beauty and expression, all of which turns into some damn fine works. And is it any surprise? They were stuck inside on rainy days with nothing but pen and paper and their own creativity. Mary Shelley is a perfect example. As the story goes, at age 19 she was vacationing with a bunch of writers, and one day it started to rain so they were all stuck inside with nothing to do. So Lord Byron (the famous poet) said they each should think up a story. Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein, which later became her most famous book. She thought the story because it was raining. It's not a stretch to say if there was no rain that day, we'd have no Frankenstein. She explained, "I busied myself to think of a story, - a story to rival those which had excited us to this task." That's what you do when it rains, you busy yourself to think of the best things your brain can muster.

To further prove this weather theory of culture, let's turn to Russia. Russia is not only overcast, it's freezing cold, so they're shut inside for even longer than the English. Thus it's no surprise that they have such a great tradition of literature--of long, complex, rich, intense, intelligent novels. And then they take a break to play a long, complex, intense, intelligent game of chess.

When I was talking all this over with a Fulbright colleague, he agreed. He said people in these bad-weather countries are always indoors, where they sit down and say "let's think this through." And what's the "this"?  Only our most essential and most desperate questions. Then they write it all down, and are kind enough to share it with everyone else, most of whom are far away and outside, enjoy their own country’s beautiful weather.

It's Overcast Today Part 1

It’s overcast today in Sheffield.  It’s overcast most days.  I think that's why England colonized so many places--they wanted territory with some sun.  And the grayness is boring:  it's not a black swirl of clouds rushing in for a storm, it's not puffy clouds with beams of sunlight shining through.  It's just a big, heavy slate of gray pushing down on everything.  Sometimes it will finally rain, but it’s always a gentle rain that doesn’t even require an umbrella--it’s like water decided to hang out in the air for a while.  You don’t even get the eventfulness of a downpour, you just get some wetness to make it even more of a bummer.  I think that's why London is such an incredible city.  It's like they decided to make it so big and varied and impressive and busy and culturally rich that the weather is irrelevant.  You don't care if it's dreary, because you're heading somewhere indoors to enjoy some of the world’s finest intellectual and artistic achievements.  But in the rest of the country, it's just dreary. 

When I read Keats' anthropomorphization of the English sun,

            “So dear a picture of his sovereign power,

            And I could witness his most kingly hour,

            When he doth lighten up the golden reins,

            And paces leisurely down amber plains.”

I couldn’t help thinking “what sun are you talking about?”

I guess some people like the gray weather. But I don’t. I’ll self-diagnose and say I have seasonal affective disorder, so I take it harder than most.

And an overcast sky affects everything.  It’s not just that there’s a gray sky up there; when it’s overcast everything down here is gloomy and washed out too. Sidewalks, storefronts, trees, cars, jeans, mailboxes, dog collars, shoelaces are all transformed for the worse.  It’s most accurate to say I’ve lived in two Sheffields: one when it’s overcast, and one when it’s (occasionally) sunny.

That must be why English authors wax so poetic when the sun finally does come out. They usually feel compelled to put pen to paper when the spring sun emerges after a bleak winter.  Here’s Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights:

“In winter, nothing more dreary, in summer, nothing more divine than those glens shut in by hills, and those bluff, bold swells of heath.”

Notice how she doesn’t have the spirit to list any images when she mentions the winter--she’s been so sapped by the lack of sun that he can only muster up the adjective “dreary.” But once she writes the word “summer,” the sentence takes off with superlatives and rhythm and musicality and particularity.

Or Orwell:

“Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.”

See, when the sun comes out everything is transfigured, down to the policeman’s tunic. Two tunics: one when the sun is out, one when it’s overcast.

My friend Jeanne came and visited me for a weekend in Sheffield.  To my surprise it was sunny and warm the entire time. She left saying Sheffield was a “magical” city. Magical?  The city described  as a “blah town,” a “collapsed industrial community,” and “the Pittsburgh and Detroit of England”?  The city of "fumes and furnace-glares" as poet Philip Larkin wrote?  But that’s what the sun can do for you.

I always wondered about this when my students go on college visits.  What if they visit a school and it’s raining that day? Wouldn’t that color your whole impression of the place?  What if they only visit two schools and it was raining for one visit but sunny for the other?  Wouldn’t the sunny one have an incredible advantage?

(Also, when you visit a school, you get one guide that day.  I’ve always wondered, what if you get a great, friendly, funny, good-looking guide?  Wouldn’t that color your whole perception of the school?  Or what if you get curt and unpleasant one?  How can you even know how you feel about a school with all the randomness that comes in a one-day visit?  You can't. All of life is probably just guesswork anyway.)

But the worst part of an overcast day isn’t that it washes out the world where you move and exist. It soon turns into a slow obliteration.  A bitterly cold day in Chicago has a narrative, has drama, has some aggression on which you can build your own flinty toughness.  But a gray day in Sheffield is a leaking away into flatness, into absence. You’d give anything to be in some sort of acute pain or specific trauma, because that at least has some poetry in it. Instead your brain just fogs up and you lose your claim on the afternoon.  You're a half self that can only half see, half think, half breathe, half plan, half live.

And then when the sun finally does come out, you get panicked.  The sun is out!  What should I do?  I have to get out of the house right now!!  I have to let it beam on my face with no sunglasses and I'll let it burn out my retinas if I need to!!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  I just started a load of laundry.  Stay there sun, stay there, I'm coming out in a second!  I need to let you soak into my exposed skin and bank it for the next 3 weeks!

In the past I've wondered how England and Spain, two countries not all that far apart, can be so different.  In Spain they party all night.  In England, most shops close by 6.  In Spain you meet to go out at 11:30 pm.  In England, you've completed your R.E.M. stage by 11:30. In Spain they're and loud and playful and dance in loose clothing.  In England they're enclosed and quiet and inhibited and thoughtful.  But these countries are only about 700 miles apart--as far apart as Chicago and New York. So what gives?  Obvious: the weather. Spain is warm and sunny and a Mediterranean climate.  England lives under a dome of drizzle.  If I had to pick only one thing that creates any country's cultural character, I'd probably go with the weather.  Finnish people are quiet and in their snow covered houses. Brazilians are gyrating their tan bodies in the street.

The sun is so damn important. In a long and wonderful routine about how New York is better than California, George Carlin then confesses that he actually lives in Los Angeles. “So why do I live here?” he asks.  “Because the sun goes down a block from my house.” Later he explains why he chooses to worship the sun instead of God:

"Overnight I became a sun-worshipper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know? So every day I can see the sun, as it gives me everything I need; heat, light, food, flowers in the park, reflections on the lake, an occasional skin cancer, but hey. At least there are no crucifixions, and we're not setting people on fire simply because they don't agree with us. Sun worship is fairly simple. There's no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don't have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing. And the best thing about the sun, it never tells me I'm unworthy. Doesn't tell me I'm a bad person who needs to be saved. Hasn't said an unkind word. Treats me fine. So, I worship the sun. But, I don't pray to the sun. Know why? I wouldn't presume on our friendship. It's not polite."