Free Outside of a Dog by Rick Gekoski Page A

the present, mind, body and spirit in collision.
    The Waste Land neither demanded nor allowed paraphrase. Neither did it have a philosophy, a single voice (like a poem by Whitman or Ginsberg), or a clear structure. Though we were
supposed to confine ourselves to the words on the page, we snuck off to the Van Pelt Library nonetheless. It was one of my haunts in my first semester as a freshman, a refuge from that lonely
disorientation that accompanies leaving home for the first time. I had located a comfy chair in a quiet alcove, which I began to regard as my own, and would repair there most days to read: first
the novels of Camus, then all of Kafka, then the major novels of Sartre. Existentialism – in high school I thought the term was ‘existentionalism,’ which I used with embarrassing
frequency – was current and sexy, and I wanted to know more.
    My enthusiasm for the new philosophy occasioned one of my very few arguments with my father, who liked plain speaking and caught a whiff of cant in my advocacy of the existential.
    ‘What does it mean, exactly?’ he asked in a voice I suspect he used for cross-examinations.
    ‘It’s from Jean-Paul Sartre,’ I explained, ‘it’s a form of French philosophy.’
    ‘I know that perfectly well. Tell me about this philosophy.’
    ‘The key is that existence precedes essence, that you choose who you are, you don’t have any nature. You are entirely free to make yourself. If you make the wrong choices it’s
called bad faith, and the responsibility is entirely your own.’
    He considered this for a moment.
    ‘Tell it to the Jews who died in the concentration camps,’ he said tartly. ‘Did they choose that? Do Negroes choose segregation? Have they got this “freedom” to
make themselves whatever they wish?’ A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, he had done pro bono work on cases involving discrimination, was entirely on the side of the underdog, and
had little time for ‘philosophy’ abstracted from the reality of daily engagement with the world.
    ‘I’m not so sure Sartre is interested in that,’ I said. ‘He’s more concerned with the French bourgeoisie . . .’
    ‘He should be interested! He lived through the war, didn’t he? But I am more interested in why you are so concerned with the French middle classes. Surely there are more
pressing things to worry about right here, and now.’
    He was genuinely cross, and we agreed to drop the subject. I’d rarely encountered him in such an unforgiving mood, though it was to recur a few years later, when I wrote from Oxford to say
that I was contemplating a trip to Poland to find members of our family. I got a sharp letter by return, asking why I supposed that any of them had survived, and why it was that I wished to visit a
country from whose barbarous anti-Semitism my grandparents had narrowly escaped? I made other plans.
    I suppose my reading in the library during my freshman year was partly designed to frame a rebuttal of my father’s argument, but instead it confirmed it: Sartre had recanted his original
position, for the very reasons my father had given. (I never told him this, and began to suspect he’d read the relevant texts.)
    Better to join him in our mutual regard for T.S. Eliot whose palpable anti-semitism my father was curiously able to forgive, I became obsessed with The Waste Land , with trying to figure
it out. There were a lot of books about Eliot, confirming how difficult he was, but no Collected Letters . His essays were studiedly impersonal, and left his personality a matter of
conjecture. A starchy young man from the mid-West, who had assimilated seamlessly into English social and intellectual life, Eliot evolved into a high church, high table sort of chap: formal,
conventional, retiring. That was the prevailing impression anyway. There were no biographies to be found; indeed, on his death in 1965 he left express instructions that no such were to be
attempted. When