I am not a brave man at all, but a cautious, even timid soul who makes himself pull off one stunt after another for his own good.Hypocrisy is a great shadow over life. We are all possessors of hypocrisy just as we are all possessors of shadows. Like our shadows, hypocrisy grows and shrinks but never fully leaves us. The great length of humanity's shadow sickens us. From the privileged college kids discussing poverty to the fearful readers of high adventure to the many residents of church pews on Sunday, few, if any are able to match up the ideals of their worldview with the reality of their worldlife. Most live a disgustingly righteous life in their minds while their actual actions are dirty, sticky, dull, and muddy with selfishness. Every great proponent of anything has failed to live up to his own advice. We are often in word but rare in deed.
Above all, how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason! As my best friend Ben likes to say, What you get is what you get. And I hope that as what I get diminishes, thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss or authority’s love-taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully. But there is no gainsaying the fact that what I’ve gotten is more than many people’s share. Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted. The question is what I make of them. When Thoreau went to ground at Walden Pond, he got free use of Emerson’s land. When he was jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax, a lady bailed him out. Do these two footnotes of dependency vitiate the integrity of his eloquence? It may well be that Thoreau lacked gratitude for these favors, or that his self-reliance was never as perfect as he pretended or I once imagined. What of that? During the time of their fashioning, words may or may not dwell with their maker in a relationship of “sincerity.” After the maker has finished with them, they live to the extent that they inspire us. I might not have been allowed to be, nor wanted to be, Thoreau’s friend. But Walden gives me pleasure and makes me braver. So does riding the rails. If this essay can do the same for you, then my material comforts, even if in your eyes they render me a dilettante or a hypocrite, have been useful means to that end. If this essay fails, the fault must be in it, in you, me, the orange bucket or some combination of the above; all the same, it was still written “sincerely.”
How many people have become embittered at the sight of so much hypocrisy, at such a shadowy land? No one can last long in such a shadowland without being driven to anger, bitterness and hatred. You've met these people. Former idealists who have been hurt too many times by friends and fellows, prematurely retired zealots who found they didn't have the strength to push through on their own and now recognize the shadows in others that are similar to their own. So their shadows grow long with the lengthening shadows of the world and it seems the sun is setting on them.
Standing beneath a tree, it's hard to see anything but shadowy shapes. Walking through a shadowed valley, few wildflowers are noticed. Sitting in the shade of a porch, dimness. But we cannot forgot that shadows are always produced by realities in the sun. What looks to be ugly and dark is only our perception of a thousand bright-shining leaves. What look like great walls looming forbodingly over us, are the gentle green slopes covered in heather and red. What is dimness, is the misperception of goodness. Hypocrisy will always exist and often in great quantities, but like shadows it is a slight impression made by a good reality. To dwell in shadows, to search them out first, to roll oneself up in them, to find them about you is to fail to use your eyes and to gaze at a flat, monochrome representation of the truth. If you live in shadows, look at the sunlight side of the shadow-caster.
Get pissed if you would like. Sit down in your little shadowland and find the world unintersting and gray and dull. But remember, this is not reality. So look atVollmann and Thoreau and myself and anyone who has ever let you down, all great paragons of outspoken hypocrisy, and recognize that it couldn't be so shadowy if there weren't such a bulk of goodness standing between you and the sun.
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