Out of Place: Montaigne in the Age of Trump

Abstract

Out of PlaceMontaigne in the Age of Trump David Gessner 1. AWAKENING My neighbor across the marsh keeps on hammering. There is a new president this morning, my daughter can't stop crying, and still my neighbor hammers on. It is possible this is celebratory hammering. I woke this morning of November 9, 2016, to the sound of my thirteen-year-old daughter slamming her fist into the wall. She couldn't believe it. Join the club. The only way I managed to fall asleep last night was thanks to the doggie Xanax my wife had procured from the vet. She had seen this coming a long time before I did. She was still suffering from PTSD from an earlier election, when she blissfully went to sleep thinking that the craven frat boy had been exorcised and that she would wake to a boring but acceptable presidentelect, and then was woken up by none other than me at 2 a.m. to tell her that no, the boring guy actually hadn't won. So this time she was ready. This time she went to the vet and explained that our anxious Labrador (who was also the smarter Lab, by the way, and who, unlike the other Lab, would do okay on her dog SATs) was feeling even more anxious. The vet never suspected that when my wife said the word Labrador it was a code word for me. And so during the last month, the home stretch, as the strange and terrifying election built up like a Poseidon-flipping wave, she has been occasionally nibbling on little quarters of our dog's drugs. It seemed to work well, and I didn't notice any hair growing on the backs of her hands, so last night I broke off my own little piece and finally fell asleep. This morning, after trying to calm my daughter and driving her to school, I briefly turned on the TV. Then I shut it off and recognized an impulse that would become familiar to me over the next year: the urge to retreat. Approximately 447 years before this election morning, a man named Michel de Montaigne wrote these words: "We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude." Luckily, I have just such a back shop. Mine is not a particularly [End Page 9] large backyard but it does border a tidal marsh, and it does have a small copse of trees in the far corner where I built an eight-by-eight outbuilding that I've come to call the shack. The shack is where I go to get away in the evenings, books and a beer in hand, to spend an hour or two thinking and bird-watching and cultivating a corresponding mental back shop, and it is here I came this morning, eager to escape the world. No electricity means no cable news, which means that the angry jabbering that has become the baseline of our lives is, for me, at least sometimes replaced by what Montaigne called the conversation "between us and ourselves" in a place private enough that "no outside association or communication can find a place." This morning I find it harder than ever to really get away. A great blue heron flies past, silvery and ghostlike, but then I hear the hammering from across the way. The view from the shack used to face out on a hundred yards of marsh and a line of trees on the opposite bank. Now, courtesy of a loud and bullying neighbor who moved in across the water, it faces a construction site, the trees mowed down, the hammering and chain-sawing and wood-chipping never stopping. There is a new dock that juts in my direction and stares in on me where I sit. I should say another word about the setting. The tidal creek the shack sits next to is named Hewlitts, and the state we are in is North Carolina, the home of the new civil war, where I, this morning, stand on one side of the marsh while my neighbor, a local...