Bruce did The Adventure. He’s home now to tell about it.

A Life In and Out of Time

Morning Melody and Salt in the Air

          I became acquainted with uncanny possibilities. The world is not only ordinary, and though the state-of-affairs needn’t be divisive, the ordinary may be subsumed altogether. Once at four in the morning when I was 15 or 16, the song of robins alighted on my awareness as a sweetness of communion beyond the social acridity of school and other gatherings. Life permeated everything, the breath of God my own, a wondrous innocence unto itself and yet an initiation. Some of what followed terrified me, especially during a five-year period of spiritual episodes. Whether I could fully return to the world as we knowingly share it became uncertain during that time.

          As a teenager, fishing more than 250 days a year, reading all the right material for taking an adult role appropriate to my interests, I would have become an outdoor writer and tournament bass fisherman. I read every outdoor magazine I could find, and I frequently competed in Bass Angler’s Sportsmen’s Society chapter tournaments, winning one or two and placing well in others. On one occasion, I competed statewide. Often waking at four in the morning, sometimes fishing before homeroom and going back out again after school, I fueled an enormous appetite for life, though I enjoyed quiet hours reading. Once while I read, it dawned on me I could write an article, so I got up and began typing “Early Largemouth,” about catching bass in late February and March, which got published in what was then The New Jersey Fisherman, now The Fisherman.

          Over the course of the next three years until I was 19, payment for how-to and where-to articles helped me buy tackle, a boat, electric motor, gas outboard, and sonar; a station wagon, stereo, and air shocks; books, magazine subscriptions…and beer. But more importantly, living close to nature—rather than approaching adult life solely through family, school, church, and society—allowed me to think deeply and at length. It proved to be an open-ended way into a life productive, pointedly energetic, profound, piled-on with difficulty…and perilous. Before I turned 18, I underwent a conversion and committed to becoming a novelist, but my adventures would amount to more than the fictional exercise of imagination.   

         Going beyond the ordinary tested more than my independence, and by proving myself able to deal with what amounted to the spiritual interiority of existence, I created an adventurous way through life rather than succumbed to dependence on professional help. I became contemptuous of professional help after experimenting with some. The whole idea that people who go inward need help, rots. The situation amounts to people with superior sensibilities being condescended to by “authorities” who label them for insurance purposes. Society is extremely jealous of those who go beyond the expected. People may believe those who do are “only mad,” as poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in his great poem “Howl,” insisting those with innocence and truth on their side are not only mad. Death, taxes, and leaky waders would seem the only way through life, as if adhering to the primacy of meaning beyond the usual treadways would only bankrupt survival. Everything, according to most people, must be compromised for conventionality. They can do just that. I go my way, and it’s not without family, friends, and complete understanding of the things that concern us in common. Mine is a successful family life with my wife, Patricia, and black Labrador Loki, while our son earns a PH.D in physics from UCLA.

           Matt is 26 as I write in September, 2025. When I was teenaged, “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost, was my favorite poem. In conversation, I said so to a customer at a gas station I worked for in April 1980, a professor of English at Trenton State College. The miracle of my life since includes remaining true to Frost’s poem, and yet the last line may not celebrate a triumph. Everyone seems to think “And that has made all the difference,” suggests final happiness. It may suggest irony instead.

Have I sacrificed? Like a dry cistern in the desert. But for decades, time and again I’ve gathered my wits and reaffirmed life. I’ve come to believe the crossroads of redefining the way I’ve chosen amounts to wisdom, but it never will be a settled issue. I update my status, as it were, every few days by writing in one of the notebooks I have at the ready. And while I take enjoyment in working things out, I’m settled on having done well, even when a particular issue feels difficult at gut, or chest, level, as they often do.  

          So many decades ago, I graduated from Lawrence High School near Princeton and enrolled for a semester at a good school for writers, Lynchburg College, where I began to learn the secret lessons of leaving school for more important things. Given the choice between quitting school and what amounts to William DeVaughn’s song “Be Thankful for What You Got,” most people might prefer the “gangsta lean” of hanging loose in the dorm…rather than to lean over the gunwale of a boat pitching among whitecaps of New Jersey’s inshore wilds. Then to balance on that gunwale and leap into January brine. (I will soon explain.)

          You might say, “If you have privilege, it’s wise to be thankful for it, rather than to throw it away.” Especially after hearing that anecdote! But for me, privilege was less than self-sufficient independence and had to be abandoned. I couldn’t see through to the bedrock of necessity, if I were in thrall to a school or place of employment. I’d have felt compromised.

Don’t we all?

No. One of the most famous examples of privilege abandoned is that of Guatama the Buddha giving up princedom. When he returned to society, he established a Sangha, a monastic community, rather than took a job. I had hoped to live on book royalties, but I don’t regret that I haven’t.  

          I did enroll at schools other than Lynchburg. They included, among others, St. John’s College in Annapolis and Hampshire College in Amherst—good schools—but rather than staying onboard for the paper chase, I settled my accounts outside the Walled Garden until I graduated from Raritan Valley Community College at age 45, which prepped me for getting published again. I took an AA in Liberal Arts, and I never sought employment by referencing that degree.

         Long before I reached 45, the winds of the spirit could have taken me without my speaking a word again, but I put my boots down on foundational support, which the “overflowing feeling of strength” that philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche championed does not move. Nietzsche has much to say about lightness, feet, and dance. “We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors—walking, leaping, climbing, preferably on lonesome mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful,” he writes in Aphorism 366, from The Gay Science translated by Walter Kaufmann. In those words, Nietzsche doesn’t reference lightness and dance directly, but you get more than an idea of the like from walking and leaping. And his is a healthy rebellion against academia, a practice all for the great outdoors. Besides, the book’s very title, underscoring gaiety, implies lightness and dance.

In Twilight of the Idols, from “The Four Great Errors,” Section 2, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche writes, “Everything good is instinct — and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, the god is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity).” Light feet move with rhythm. They dance. And the matter can be taken further and has been taken further. If light, dancing feet can’t perform among the jagged rocks of a stream, or cruise at top speed over soft bottoms of ocean bays feeling for clams, they’re not as competent as is possible. I admire Nietzsche’s hiking in the Alps, and summers in the mountains were central to his creative process, but rivalry is native to me, too. I don’t stand a chance against the greatness of his intellect, but after the fact—because it never was my intention to see one better—given that levity and fresh air outdo any drug imaginable, to have mixed open air with brine, summer and winter alike, and worked in, not on, the water, daily…that is incomparably concrete. Clam treading involved participation in the wild amounting to being truly savage in more of a Rousseauian sense, although not literally a going back to nature as if my book learning wasn’t greatly enhanced. In a way largely selected for by nature.

To me, Christ’s “salt of the earth” suggests more than congregating in a church (although taking part in congregations was a valuable part of my upbringing). It signifies purification and other qualities like preservation. Brine is better than salt alone, however, and to breathe briny air may be to sense that purity I suggest, even though the composition is, in fact, a complexity. One that seems uncanny to me. The salt air of the Jersey shore where I worked in remote areas of inshore waters has positive value mountain air doesn’t have. Working commercially, self-employed, made the operation all the more about redemption. Dealing with the modern world daily involved more to overcome. The taking of that world out there with me and turning it against its tendency towards tyranny. I can imagine Nietzsche calling the bays a slough, despite their being extensive—even I called them a slough after I’d had enough. In my prime, however, they were vital beyond anything I had imagined.

I agree that the “spirit of gravity” may sometimes encumber. Even though Nietzsche speaks well of being near the sea, could he have been suspicious of inshore waters as low-lying? His imploring of us the killing of that spirit of gravity could, perhaps, reflect poorly on bays as any place to seek inspiration, compared to the heights of the Alps. But gravity does not only imply the effort Nietzsche beats his wings against in Twilight of the Idols. Only the stability gravity creates makes dancing possible. And yet it’s almost as if Nietzsche didn’t understand the importance of foothold. I remember reading of psychologist Carl Jung’s astonishment, in, I believe, his book Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, at Nietzsche’s abandon to “the winds of the spirit,” as if Nietzsche had achieved an almost impossible feat of sanity.

          No doubt a St. John’s College education is a foothold in the classics, though I’m not advancing any suggestion of my having been better educated in classics than Nietzsche! But before I left Annapolis, I bought armloads of books from the college bookstore, the clerk feeling flabbergasted as I gleefully ran up the bill. I’ve read many of them, and yet by remaining “true to the earth,” to quote Nietzsche, I left St. John’s before doors would have barred me from the outside world. To stand alone on wild earth is foundational beyond anything an institution can provide, and while it’s necessary to study philosophy to fortify understanding of the foundational, those works should not be confused with official status. As one would hope Jean Paul Sartre made clear when he refused the Nobel Prize. As true to original works St. John’s College remains, and I’m sure will remain—no text books mar the program—it is still an official institution offering degree programs. The whole world hollers at me for raising the point as one of contention, but if anything, I’m an Aristotelian. And colleges followed after Plato’s Academy, not Aristotle’s school the Lyceum. The lone wolf isn’t always evil. Especially not if his solitude belies a wide circle of society and nature alike.

Nietzsche seems to have embodied a different sort of paradox, given the roaring winds of his spirituality, by additionally imploring followers in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to “not fly away from the earthly.” I found no contradiction exists between earth and the heavens as he must have understood them, being atheist. Just the same, I never needed his permission to remain true to the earth. The words quoted are ironic, as if I could have left a college only on their authority, when I was quite free and acted on my own.  

          That issue of earth and the heavens would be a matter of perspective. (Nietzsche championed perspective.) Let’s imagine, from the moon. Is that really so impossible? From the moon, the earth is a heavenly body like any other. I’ve understood Nietzsche’s calls to action the grandstanding they are, exhortations belonging perhaps to academia but not to the earth. Nature exceeds the morals amounting to Nietzsche’s imperatives. You might say the gathering of his “brothers” belongs to culture as the need for leadership he rightly assumed. Touche’. After all, we will defend our moral nature. But unless you “undress in the wilderness,” to quote Jim Morrison, your moral nature may be partial.

          After I dropped out of St. John’s and Hampshire, I became a being of nature through and through. I would appear to misunderstand Nietzsche if I were not to acknowledge the “master morality” he refers to, but only a state of nature occupied alone or possibly as a couple might be understood to be “beyond good and evil.” As Carl Jung discusses in Man and HIs Symbols, “The unconscious is pure nature.” Given Jung’s uniting of opposites and transcending them, one may infer the unconscious or pure nature is beyond good and evil. And yet philosopher Friedrich Schiller better understood—ultimately, he believed in mankind achieving paradise—nature’s moral goodness. “Nature follows unhindered its moral nature, i.e. the law of harmony,” he wrote in Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. But even so, beyond sturdy harmony and moral assurance is complexity that only the spiritual mind as a feverish activity may occasion, and to submit wholly and not go mad is a feat that only years of preparation can fulfill.        

          Why would anyone want to undergo the test? An uninformed guess as to why I left college amounts to the sheer joy of life, which can seem a laughably naïve predilection. You don’t grow up to feel joy; you grow up to make money. An ecstasy had informed me about living in nature on a whole other level. A much higher one. As if that were any excuse. Coming during the summer before I completed my second semester at Hampshire College, the ecstasy challenged my plans to graduate. But wasn’t I taught to repress a mad inspiration like that? As that semester closed, I took leave of absence, not certain how springtime would turn out. I soon felt convinced of turning out well, so I canceled my Hampshire College enrollment in April. It wasn’t so simple, and I deeply considered the life I was abandoning. I understood the life I could have had by keeping with the program. There are so many advantages to graduating from a good college. But I believe to this day what I chose to do instead is more important.

          As I quoted earlier, Zarathustra implores of his brethren “Remain true to the earth!” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it’s not because of that book that I had my purpose. I identified more with the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber, but not personally. Not as if he were like me, that is, because, for one, I was a great deal more physically fit--than Nietzsche, too. Treading backwards in the bay as fast as possible for five hours covers some 10 or 12 miles, given the pauses on clams. Bicycling daily as many as 20 miles to and from fishing spots had built my legs and thighs. Lifting weights after school—before I’d go fishing—had built my upper body. It remained built into my 20’s. Not that I didn’t bridge differences, but every personality has its native quality, and I kept mine. I believe Buber had seen something he knew only someone other than himself could achieve. The possibility of spiritual redemption in a state of nature. That he understood far better than had Nietzsche.

I remember reading words of Buber’s to that effect decades ago, and though I’ve searched through books of his in recent years and have not found the passage, I had suspected it’s in a book of his I wouldn’t have expected. Using Google’s Artificial Intelligence confirmed that indeed is where the passage is, which I’ll mention near the essay’s end. Regardless, even if what I understand to be Buber’s precedence is false, I was already deeply involved in nature before I began studying philosophy, and Nietzsche’s commandment seems quite unnecessary to that involvement, almost laughable. As if Nietzsche were a barker. Buber’s hallowing of the concrete world might not, however, be unnecessary to that involvement—for all I really know—but I was already committed to being in the natural world, and while that would seem utterly unnecessary in a “post-postmodern” world ruled by money, where even nature is believed to be no more than a social construct, time and again the natural world renews my life. I’ve never taken Nietzsche’s lead, though I still read him as a source of joy. His breathless “Oh, my brothers!” comes from a younger man of a different century, though it reminds me of Martin Luther King’s Baptist inspiration. It would be ridiculous if remaining true amounted to a grown man’s limitation to the breath of God. He might find himself suffering from the halitosis of dark matter, but everything that builds and fuels our civilization comes from nature and raises the questions: what is the fundamental origin? Is first cause relevant? What does it mean?

          Postmodernism couldn’t rid the logic it presumes to have dislodged. The bottomless abyss of cultural uncertainty ostensibly doing away with first cause suggests to me postmodernism’s relationship to cultural relativity, retaining the same logic of beginning with something—namely those sociocultural influences. Why not instead admit that we don’t create nature and accept that the buck stops there? Let God be something spiritual people like me encounter. Transcendence doesn’t necessarily admit of first cause, but the givenness of nature—which as such is outside our power—should be obvious. We can identify objects in nature, rearrange them to create products of our own. In a greater respect, we can greatly expand our own will by becoming united with nature and allow our animation to influence the world, though we might risk psychiatric intervention. But in any case, we begin with nature itself, and we know it precedes any power we have. You can thank Aristotle for common sense, but he would readily point out that praise is quite beside the point.

          And yet Grand Affirmations can be understood as praises for the world, even though they are movements stemming from an internality of world events that move affect outward from within, amounting to a human being’s effective power. Recurrent exaltations are for those of us in the habit of rising above pedestrian concerns, coming from the wild side of the margin distinguishing civilization from nature. They are more than a man’s own business, but also no less than his own business, because the power to move the world is a great responsibility, involving more than rhetoric and technical prowess. The mind discovers its deepest layers of identity and power, not in the necessary study of texts alone, nor by the manipulations of science and engineering, but through personal participation in the given world of nature. “Formation, transformation, eternal mind’s eternal recreation,” wrote poet, novelist, statesman, and scientist Wolfgang von Goethe. The way I read Goethe’s fascinating line suggests to me what can become of rootedness in nature. That will be addressed later.

          In the Conquest of the Irrational, Salvador Dali spoke of paranoid-critical activity as moving from “delirium to the plane of reality,” a going deep within and an emergence. Ultimately, a moving of the world itself. Motion without purpose has no moral agency; only individual integrity with its conscious perspective can achieve anything uniquely human. Certainly a power deep within, great enough to move the world, calls on great human responsibility. Otherwise, it only leads to the madhouse. There, one is left feeling a fool. And yet any of us create purpose in nature. It is our nature to find there what life is for. Our first principle. Our originality.   

          Anyone might say, “No, I create purpose in the comfort of my office,” but a human being is dependent on the natural functioning of his body and mind. Not only are they inseparable; together they are inseparable from the environment as well.

           Long ago, the pristine perfection of environments must have felt alluring. Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” is a sweeping, high-pitched rendition of voyage. Robert Plant wrote of Norsemen on their way to new lands, and it’s easy to imagine some of those lands perfectly pristine that far back in our history. And yet deep within each of us, paradise remains as pure. The whole of mankind is immigrating to a state of fulfillment few can begin to imagine. Ecstatic joy like nothing the 60’s approached. Although the Norsemen were warriors, the future I envisage is a Powerful Peace. The trailbreakers, however, are every bit as savage as the song’s tempo and tone.

The Inward Adventure and Publication

          Although what amounts to the inward adventure has more to do with nature than texts introducing a novitiate, I credit Hampshire College for a course I took: Recovery, Rebirth, and Renewal, taught by John Boettiger, a grandson of Franklin D. Roosevelt who spent part of his boyhood in the Whitehouse. The syllabus included writings of Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Ingmar Bergman, the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell, and recondite texts on inward life. To approach any undertaking, it is essential to study, and only that study which is a great passion will enable an individual to take on a great adventure. Other courses made a difference for me, too. Never having equated college education with a degree, I don’t downplay the value of having attended eight schools. The notion that having a college and/or university education depends on a degree leaves out the value of learning as transcending the official status. And it is quite conceivable that refusing the official status of a degree may involve an individual’s advantage. A similar situation is found in Jean Paul Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He believed a writer should not be an official figure. Human beings get seduced into all sorts of things. No one is immune as Plato knew, who had attempted to educate Dionysius II, the tyrant of Syracuse, only to see him grow more interested in debauchery and revelry. As counterintuitive as it may seem, had I earned a degree, I might have wasted my talents in professional jobs.

          The chief concern of most who graduate is gainful employment. That has more to do with the continued rituals of official status than financial necessity, so the fundamental issue is the mind’s integrity. Regarding the vast discrepancies of income in society, the emphasis on a job’s status rather than financial necessity should be clear, although undue importance given to status is not my intention. Of course not. I’ve spent decades in the working class! Bottom line, decent status depends on being paid! But although most people think employment is all about money, it’s about the kind of power the media reflects. The world of the mainstream insider. Money is only the means of exchange, and yet here’s my final point on the issue: jobs have a much deeper role than officiality. They cement society together through personal relations. Workers of opposite political beliefs work side by side. Even as good friends.

          I’ve enjoyed greater success than any jobs have conferred. Getting published during my teens instilled in me an absolute confidence, although I appreciate the compliments for doing jobs well. That confidence from getting published does owe a little to schooling—soon after seeing my first article in print, a high school journalism course interested me. Within a few years, it led to a self-defining situation I’ll tell you about soon. While taking the course, I also wrote for the New Jersey Outdoors magazine and the Trenton Times newspaper, in addition to The New Jersey Fisherman. A year later, the internationally distributed Fishing World published an article of mine about ice fishing, and the magazine’s editor, Keith Gardner, urged me to study journalism and English in college. The letter from him would have made my resume a winner, had I applied to a major outdoor magazine for a job as an editor.   

          While yet a high school senior, I got short fiction published in the literary journal Earthrise, also placing second in an essay contest on the environment promulgated throughout the Mercer County public school system and likely elsewhere in the region. I continued to write about fishing while curiosity took my interests in different directions. None of them led away from the wilds I hallowed as easily as breathing.  

          Until a few weeks before my 20th birthday late in October, I still identified with the ostensible reality of convention. Early that September, I sought work at the Beach Haven Times/Manahawkin Beacon, taken on as a stringer. Soon, the editor-in-chief offered me a feature assignment on housing development there on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. For the most part, development of the island had completed. I took the assignment without hesitation.

          I gathered the story from a fascinating primary source—a builder who owned 13 helicopters. Having lived four months on Long Beach Island, I’d engaged conversations at bars over that period of time and heard about that man and his helicopters. Only weeks later, the man sat at his desk facing me, a photo of each helicopter aligned in a pattern that would flank him if extended, a slightly impertinent facial expression belying his willing assent to the careful answering of each of my questions, perhaps a few new ones generated in the process. The editor published the story and offered me a staff position, which I refused. That was a sharply self-defining situation. I felt proud of having done work good enough to prompt the offer, and I restrained my feeling sorry for the editor. Instead of settling into the professional lifestyle—I understood the attractions, of course—self-employment as a commercial clam treader, involving the leaping into brine while wearing wetsuits in January, also mentioned earlier, allowed me to go very deep into nature, which inspired prolific and insightful writing. I wanted to be a literary writer, not a news reporter, and although I was naïve to draw a hard distinction between the two, finding my voice in the bay wilds fulfilled a desire I had felt at Lynchburg: to “find my voice (as a writer) in the wilderness.” I had believed that would involve working as a park ranger in an honest-to-God wilderness, but clamming suited the purpose even better, because it involved direct participation in nature. I had sung the proverbial phrase “a voice that cryeth in the wilderness” while performing an anthem as a member of the Trinity Episcopal Church, Princeton, Choir of Men and Boys, but I had no conscious awareness of the connection between my desire and that phrase as well known. My objective was born of years spent in nature as a boy and teenager.   

          Despite my break with the newspaper, my interest in journalism survived decades. I wrote a news feature on a fishery survey of New Jersey’s largest lake for Lake Hopatcong News in 2015, which involved interviews with three primary sources, and I thoroughly enjoyed the work. One of the sources asked me how much I was getting paid—a hundred dollars—then asked if it was worth it. Of course it was! And the editor went out of her way to praise the work. I’ve also reported on dam removals in New Jersey for several news organizations, one of the pieces published in USA Today.com. I can’t remember the clues I followed to find my chief source in Brian Cowden, principal at Trout Scapes River Restoration LLC, when I wasn’t as connected among the New Jersey angling community as I am now, but he’s been very helpful. Other original sources for the articles have included watershed association presidents, and I have frequently found and continue to find different sorts of primary sources like tackle company CEO’s, state fisheries biologists, guides, and outstanding anglers for other articles besides.

          All those decades ago on Long Beach Island, I was still 19, almost 20, living alone in Beach Haven Crest, renting the five-bedroom house I had stayed in during the summer with four friends, not yet finished writing for the newspaper. My 10-horsepower outboard motor, which ran wonderfully well, though I had bought it used for only $80.00 a couple of years before, was destroyed by a thunderstorm when my boat capsized on its mooring line, which limited me to rowing. There in Beach Haven Crest during the evening of October 1st, I experienced a great flash of inward light, a powerful electrical sensation enveloping me from my scalp to my toenails, the entirety of my being a singular intellectual grasp of the universe. As the insight came, I had probed inwardly by writing with great intensity, knowing there must be something deep down within me to uncover.

          Three years prior, while ice fishing alone, my arms shot skyward when I was seized by the sudden need to shout out loud, “God give me truth!” Taken directly into relation with reality beyond me, nothing contrived, premeditated, or false about that demand existed. It was a violent confession torn from me, an ecstatic rupture of the shell of my personality coming from desperate spiritual need in a world compromised by uncertain social relations. It happened sometime near sunset in peaceful surroundings. Not the upending of a tendency to disbelieve—I never doubted God’s existence—it nevertheless obliterated me as if I had stepped on a land mine.    

          My most complete enlightenment having arrived that October evening in Beach Haven Crest, I believed that I encountered God. Overwhelmed all night, for the next eight months, most of the time I was ecstatic. It’s not as if we should expect unambiguous affirmation to be the social norm, but it helps sometimes, and if little is forthcoming from society, then God might be an enormous compensation for the lack. I didn’t work the bays or any other job for most of those eight months, but I read and wrote more and less daily, no longer accepting ordinary reality naively. My writing continues to be informed by insight cutting through convention.

          Refusal of the staff position at Beach Haven Times/Manahawkin Beacon exemplifies my tendency to feel contempt for professionalism. It was expected of me, and I’m not innocent of trying to gain some. Nor do I lack respect for it, of course I don’t. Imagine refusing needed medical care. But when it comes to keeping the depth within alive, I have my preferences for the working class. Many others during the 1960’s saddled with “high” expectations refused, as college dropouts, professional jobs. Generally, however, they avoided such responsibility only until older. I, of course, understood the stress of working low level jobs. I tried to land a professional job in 1996, and I had worked seven years for a tough wage from a credit union when I applied for a job as a news reporter, though I got no offer. I felt relief for that when, a year later, my feeling for the job at the credit union got dramatically better, because I had figured out how to fish on my lunch breaks.

All told, few people would place more value on philosophical encounter with the world than on getting published. Much—not all—of what my philosophizing amounts to is the encountering of my thoughts while writing by pen in notebooks. They number in the hundreds, though it’s possible not a word of them will get published. They would need a good editor; unrevised work may not necessarily be unpublishable, but it usually doesn’t get published. I almost hate to make my son responsible for it after I die. The takeaway is that the notebooks have served a process valuable regardless of whether the writing survives.  

          Working class or professional, finding one’s own way amounts to the motto of my blog Litton’s Fishing Lines: “An Angler Always Finds a Way.” And yet, by finding my voice in the wilds of the bays, I suffered the proverbial case of being lost to that wildness. I would not pass the test of return without utterance of what I’d learned in the ordinary world, and making my way to the ordinary world proved to be extremely difficult. A pressing need that by all I could judge amounted to all or nothing. I was going to die or get locked up as a head case. Or I was going to make it as a family man, but first things first. After five years of enormous spiritual episodes, I just wanted to be normal again. Normal for me, though, allowed additional converse with nature. Through hundreds of thousands of blog visitations, many readers understand I’m not limited to the physical act of fishing. My words reconcile civilization to nature, although that’s an ongoing problem that neither myself nor anyone else will solve altogether. Nor will artificial intelligence. Some problems are ongoing and work serves them as necessity. For an apt analogy, teeth need brushing every day. Most people seem to dream of a panacea and jump on various bandwagons that promise them this or that final resting place, rather than going their own way, and yet when you get to know any one of them, you find he or she is an idiosyncratic individual. Only a psychiatrist should be eager to judge another as mad. It’s his livelihood. Ayn Rand put it best when she wrote, “There are no masses in America. We’re a nation of individualists.”  

          As for being an individual, self-understanding is more difficult to achieve than the judgements of others are to bear, which is why a lifetime of attempting to understand oneself arrives upon indifference as to what others think in the end. Understanding family background does help. For example, involvement in the arts and sciences means my habit of reading daily shouldn’t be surprising. My father died in 2022, but he remains a musician featured by Wikipedia, and my mother, who died in 2012, worked for Esso (now ExxonMobil) as a chemist until I was born. She was the only woman working at the plant in Connecticut and read science daily into her elder years. Ideas, anecdotes, and informal essays I write by hand in notebooks originate, in large part, where conversations with my mother, beginning when I was a five-year-old, left off.

          While ExxonMobil is now accused of climate change denialism, it’s not an accident that, as my mother’s son, I would do better than only see the possibility Friedrich Schiller noted in the eighteenth century, of civilization becoming a paradise, And yet, before we “get to that place where we really wanna go,” to quote Bruce Springsteen, we have the severest of tests to pass. We’ll use what we presently call AI—by then AI will be quite autonomous—to empty the population of flooded coastal regions and rearrange society to accommodate the refugees. It’ll be a mess but we’ll get by. Notably, Schiller himself saw mankind going through a long and arduous struggle before arriving upon paradise.

          Having profoundly immersed myself in nature, and having submitted to the enormous expanse of a visionary mind—these are acts of great abandon that family influence might not easily explain. Though my rebellion against society went to the root, and I rejected my parents’ having been well-employed as any necessity for myself, these two factors can’t fully explain my abandon. During my semester at Lynchburg, I still saw myself pursuing professional work like my parents, though there were powerful countervailing currents moving me. By the next fall, I knew I could submit to nature and the spirit, and eventually I understood I was doing so in a way that demanded all but complete abandonment of conventional pursuit. If any kind of self-employed pursuit of the dollar is conventional, along with such enjoyments as dining out, there never was any reason to give up conventionality altogether. I’m certainly happy about that! As I say, rather than family upbringing having to do with my submission to nature and the spirit—though I’ve pointed out how it does in a deep way, given my mother’s employment at Esso—it’s reasonable to think genetics has to do with an embrace of the primary level. According to genealogical research my brother David has done, relation to Merewether Lewis—who suffered the “divine madness” of manic-depression—is likely. Manic-depression doesn’t explain it away, though, because from the beginning in my boyhood when I regularly spent time alone in nature, I’ve accumulated a body of work that is consciously deliberative rather than madness. And yet despite any echo from on high, as if my engagement in nature suggests that of Lewis, my father hotly opposed my abandonment to nature and my spirituality. He couldn’t have guessed Lewis had anything to do with it and feared I willfully invited mental illness.

          But what is a visionary mind to such sensible modernity as was my father’s? People omit the original meaning of “visionary” and apply the word only to entrepreneurs, most having no idea what a truly visionary mind is. A mind like William Blake’s, John Milton’s, and Jacob Boehme’s. My father knew something about a mind like’s Blake’s, though, and wanted mine to be nothing like it. I had gone far, far beyond the pale, in Dad’s opinion. He tended to react to my fervid pursuit of spiritual states and ideas, ideas which I struggled to capture in my handwritten notebooks, as if I wasn’t going to be able to care for myself. But he struggled back and forth. On one occasion when I visited my parents for a short stay, I wrote, rapt in imagination, when I looked up and saw Dad had been watching me. “All a passion of creative genius,” he said, smiling. So, he let me know—just once—that he knew, though that struggle at letting me be was difficult for him. He deserves credit for his patience and for the growth of his understanding into his later years. No small feat, given the difficulty of my behavior in a world of people conforming to insider norms. But after I became a family man, he spent decades very pleased with me. He learned over time how satisfied I was with life, despite my frankness about unhappiness with jobs, and it made him happy. He understood I had something more I lived for, both as a family man and a writer. And, as may seem obvious, I never had any cause to repent my youth. Besides a very, very few—people never wholly submit to the reality of the spiritual. Many will never have any idea of why it’s important, either, but the struggle Schiller wrote of can only be led by the few who understand civilization and mankind from within.

Coming Home

          After I left New Jersey’s inshore marine waters in 1993, I returned to the mainstream. On some occasions, I foresaw decades ahead of “becoming moral,” as I believe Nietzsche remarked in one of his books. As I remember, he implored of society to allow his protégé to become one among others. (Plato believed anyone leaving “the Cave” might be thought mad by others upon his return.) I’ve been looking for Nietzsche’s statement in various of his books; I don’t believe it’s a false memory. The passage doesn’t entirely describe what I understood to be my social situation, because I wasn’t without morality just because I had lived more and less in a state of nature. Nothing else may be “beyond good and evil” as is a state of nature admitting of the spiritual, but Aristotle had more to say about that in The Politics. And yet, so did Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols, though following from “Old Aristotle,” he wrote, “a beast and a god.” I had undone habits of my past and had been absent from developing according to the mores of my generation. You might say that after I had relegated mainstream convention to “ostensible” reality status, I no longer deserved to be in any way part of it! But let my teachers be the people I never abandoned once and for all. The man who comes home hasn’t burned his bridges. Let the proof of morality be the boon that results in more perfect union. It never was a sin to abandon the conventional world for the spiritual. Wonder. Marvel. Paradise. Terror. Each quality filled out existence as a world of its own theme. Besides, I supported myself. (For the most part.)

          I spent a summer profoundly absorbed into nature. As memory serves me, I had saved enough money and didn’t work that summer. My longstanding girlfriend, who implored of me on one of our first dates, “Take me there,” was drawn into a paradisiacal otherworldliness the likes of which people are normally excluded from because educated otherwise. It was the summer of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden, 1986. Maureen had been with me four years, which had prepared her.

          The next summer, I began holding jobs, though I continued to clam, besides. Clamming paid much better, but jobs allowed me conditional responses within common frameworks while my mental state occupied a vast spirituality I feared would collapse without the structure and support. Habits make any way possible. I set an alarm clock before work but always awoke less than two minutes before it would go off. My mind possessed oversight and participation in the daily world gave it such acute specificity as knowing when to wake.

           Five years of heightened consciousness a query into the possibility of freeing society, I attempted to dissolve isolation by letting in peace and light. The spirit’s interiority, belonging to everyone, took conscious direction from me, the collective unconscious Carl Jung researched is no static entity and never altogether under conscious control. Rather than believing the man Outside—writer and philosopher Colin Wilson capitalized the word—is beast or a god, think of the situation as that of a man finding the root directory “Beyond the Wall.” That is the title of one of Edward Abbey’s books, implying the given fact of nature. Why give a man para-anthropic identity? Nevertheless, the “software development” initiated Outside and influencing social evolution is the work of a philosopher.  

          I was patient during those years because I understood the chief objective of my work remained centuries in the future. Little of it served immediate results. For example, the frequent encounters with other people when I was out shopping and so forth often became occasions of positive emotional contagion, even though my demeanor was quiet and calm. A combined magnetic gravity and radiance of mine didn’t seem to affect everyone, but it did affect some. To put it simply, I believe in that future paradise of mankind I’ve mentioned. Not Nietzsche or Buber, nor Schiller, serve as the author of my belief. I came into paradisiacal experience as a consequence of a lifetime spent outdoors, and committed to thinking, before I read any of them, and I became aware of the future centuries distant through experience rather than words on a page. I found paradise awakened within depths of nature, but it’s not the environment alone that makes the difference. Deep within each of us pristine perfection exists. Original paradise is easily thought to be dependent on pristine environment, but we can create beauty because it exists in us. Even environments that technically are not pristine can be experienced in all the native glory we’re not aware of until we unite with them.  

          Seven years after the summer spent in nature, I finished my clamming and sold the last of nine boats I had owned. I began doing temp jobs, which included six or seven months on a team of technicians with the company Dendrite, a distributer of laptops to corporate groups when such business was new. We enjoyed lavish meals and close-knit parties in Chicago and Scottsdale, flying to those places while on the clock. But five years of temping felt mostly abject.

          I felt terribly isolated during those partying 90’s, though during off-hours I enjoyed plenty of activities with my wife, including some of added conversational variety with extended family. Otherwise, the importance of my writing tore me apart because I feared it would never emerge. After the temping, I worked 13 years for the credit union, and I finished in 2025 nearly nine years of working in a supermarket. As I hinted at earlier, I believe professional positions would never have allowed me—as the working class did—the mental freedom to think productively beyond the job. I always put doing the job first, however, and while working for the credit union, my quarterly evaluations exceeded expectations. (The supermarket offered none.)

          Wage jobs have, of course, made it possible for me to contribute to paying bills as a family man, but also to participate in and understand the American mainstream, enjoy the company of others, and to enjoy the satisfaction of long-term commitment that requires no less than hard work. Hard work minute by minute—for hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades.

          Every day at the supermarket, I started with three minutes spent on the computer.

          How easy that is.

          Wage jobs have also served as the original settings of friendships, a few entertained for decades, and yet despite so much I’ve said in praise of such jobs, anyone might agree getting published is more important, a deeply personal value because the interests are vital. And getting published better serves relationships to friends, family, and the rest of society. The reaching out to others firsthand with something to offer.

          Take that or leave it. My primary concern is to produce good work.

          Over the course of 13 years at the shore, I looked to a future of publishing regularly again; I never believed I wouldn’t return to the mainstream. Naturally, I hoped for a self-sustaining income by authoring books, but few writers earn as much as I do, which, so far, is little, though helpful. My young son, Matt, made all the difference. At age four, he insisted on fishing with me three or four times a week. I soon had sufficient photography to begin freelancing again, and I paid Matt for photographs of his that got published, which he took of me with fish.    

          Since 2005, articles, essays, and photography of mine have appeared in dozens of publications including The Fisherman, New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News, Salmon and Steelhead Journal, The Drake, Tail Fly Fishing, Swing the Fly, The Flyfish Journal, USA Today.com, Ocean, The New Jersey Monthly, others. Most of the writing about fishing, I’m also published on naturalism—about salamanders, fossils, birding, the rogue wave phenomena, and New Jersey’s timber rattlesnakes and copperheads. Other topics include philosophy, education, bipolar disorder, travel, local identity, a North Carolina shipwreck, clamming, camping, turkey and bear hunting, dam removals and river restoration. My blog Litton’s Fishing Lines includes other subjects. I get poems published in magazines that pay well. (Payment for poems is notoriously little.) A piece of mine about life as an essential worker during the COVID pandemic is published in the Transcendent Zero Press soft cover anthology Global Pandemic Crisis: a series of literary essays on quarantine. Other poems of mine appear in non-paying literary journals, and besides the COVID essay, an even longer creative nonfiction piece of mine is published in The Quantum Phoenix. It’s all a lot of fun.

          While, for art and life alike, nature is my starting point and end, no meaning exists without the mind, and the mind affirms a civilization of its making. A human being can’t help but come around to affirming civilization, unless he escapes for a bestial demise. As I’ve suggested, he may instead adopt a visionary, rather than ordinary, orientation, although in my experience, too much and too long is not only undesirable but probably fatal. A human being taken out by the spirit may make his way to the ordinary world while carrying the full certainty of great promise—challenged by no less than a gauntlet of doubt. Such is the widest act of paradox. The drive is like the power of Apollo 13 at liftoff; the doubt as fearful as Jim Lovell using the Lunar Module’s navigation system to fine-tune reentry angle. Even though the lyrics to the song “Ordinary World” by Duran, Duran involve a relationship—likely between a man and woman—the elevation of the refrain about the song’s subject making his way to the ordinary world suggests epic scope.  

          It’s the tragedy of Nietzsche’s life and the salvation of mine. Nietzsche is said to have gone insane because of syphilis contacted from a prostitute. Helplessly mad, he was taken to live with his sister. I’ll be honest and tell you I feel I’ve triumphed, but I truly pity him. And better than to pity him, that man lived such a richly soaring solitary life. Only his exultant spirituality carried by the wings of that spirit ensured his sanity, as paradoxical as that is. I know, because I couldn’t stay out as long as he might have had the syphilis not made him ill. I got lonely, involved in longings for company. If I had an intellect coursing over the ages to his degree of intelligence, I would have stayed out longer.  

          Long before my arduous efforts at return, the ascension to angelic light and the great expanse of a visionary mind was the transcendence of Kronos or steady time for the death throes of the eternal. Powerful Peace—words I got from Buber, but he, mysteriously, never seems to have written—does fulfill eternity and relieves tremendous psychological distance. That distance amounts to threatened biological life, but the embrace of universal love saves that life. You might imagine the difficulty of surviving the enigmatic oceans of cross-currenting spiritual themes. Much that lives beyond imagination is terror. Just one example of that psychological distance: we usually know the stars from the perspective our feet define, not from a sense of having been propelled out among them to meet a god who had once been human.

The wisdom of conformity instead of terror is not the issue, but human life does depend on dailiness. And yet to the contrary of the stable events a quotidian passage of time allows, I found myself fascinated by transmogrifications of being numbering in the thousands—some of them terrifying, most of them inviting—while in nature none of them seem to have had any existence independent of the mind. It’s an open question, though, if an afterlife not entirely separate from our world exists. And the mind—powered by an unimaginably high degree of spiritual energy—creates non-ordinary events. They characterized my experience for five years not altogether in isolation—other people were affected—and yet I wanted to return to the ordinary. For the most part, I did enjoy the episodes greatly. Their meaningfulness took me whole as a traveler of worlds I couldn’t say I created on my own. Not absurd delusions. But I knew my leaves taking would either kill me or I would end up institutionalized if I didn’t get over them.

The Source in Nature

          Civilization has its primary source in given nature. Nature, quite indifferent to the suffering of humankind, is objectively real—not a postmodern social construct. We do bestow upon nature its status in relation to us, but nature itself is not the construct, and getting past the known is the secret of originality.

          Spirituality will always inspire value responses, and yet nature nourishes degrees of spirituality not posing any lethal threat. On the contrary, they enhance life. And nature sustains us physically in ordinary situations not merely illusory, as Plato suggested they are illusory. Of course, as I’ve made clear, more to reality does exist than the ordinary, but the ordinary is not only a contemptible shadow. I regard the contempt for ordinary reality a flaw of cultural elitism I’ve tended to share especially in my younger years, but ordinariness is, instead, the touchstone of human survival, which leads me to neither entirely agree with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” nor with Nietzsche’s fear of “the Last Man.”

          If we regard most people as capable of living among no better than shadows, then we pass judgement on society in a way that limits it unnecessarily. Civilization is built from forms or structures existing in concretes Plato confined to the Cave. If we cannot bestow upon civilization positive value derived from the primary substance engaging our creativity, there will be no point in human production.

          Bold words in a “post-postmodern” age that rejects primacy as no longer available to human beings. Indeed, a post-truth, post-fact age of smoke and mirrors, much as Plato spoke of shadows. And yet when crossing over from “the sunlit realm”—a beautiful quote I believe is Ayn Rand describing John Galt’s world in one of her books other than Atlas Shrugged—the wild bays behind Long Beach Island knew no final goodbye. A misremembered quote can seem certain, but in any case, I re-entered the American mainstream, but without turning my back on nature. No matter what Tears for Fears sings about the situation in “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” a song becoming popular at the time of my departure from LBI for “the mainland,” as we clammers called that mythical place.

          Interfused throughout the cosmos as the mystery of nature, love is the primacy that begets originality. Much of postmodern philosophy believes the idea of originality, because influenced by social and cultural contexts, is a misnomer. To the extent of my reading about postmodernism and post-postmodernism, however, I’ve not found among the works any affirmation of creation stemming from human life in a state of nature. I believe that is overlooked entirely—as if impossible, given our state of advanced civilization—though I recall reading 20th century existentialist Martin Buber, in Tales of the Hasidim, speaking of the possibility of a “simple-hearted saint in nature.” As I recall the passage, and I might be mistaken, Buber believed the transformation implied by achieving natural unity is necessary as a step towards world redemption. It is true that the Outsider is necessarily an ascetic, given the life of society he denies himself, although there remains that creative difference in the cases of the artist and philosopher. I, for one, vehemently opposed the notion of self-denial during my youth, but what else call it? One man can, however, be all three types of exceptional human being. The emphasis on sociocultural reality with no thought given to nature is academic. That’s what postmodernism and its variants amount to, but civilization is not ruled by academia; it is cultivated by ideas engendered in nature.

          My coming book The Microlight Quest: Trout, Adventure, Renewal, is a way beyond postmodernism and any sort of post-postmodernism. Anyone who would confuse the book as “back to nature” is having trouble reading it. If considered any revival of the incessant questioning of Platonism and implying the march of footnotes throughout philosophy’s history, I find Aristotle especially throws light on where we step. Although the book answers to Aristotle’s famous statement in The Politics, it’s certainly not meant to be Greek! We should not forget, however, that without Plato and ancient Athens, we have no Constitution of the United States. And yet, although I’m fascinated with the two philosophers, I’m more concerned with the future than in going back. On the other hand, the (European) continental thought of Jacques Derrida, if I may single him out as central to postmodernism, is not native to America. We need a way forward true to our love of the outdoors.

          I believe it must allow the recognition of formal elements coming alive at a higher level of consciousness. While Aristotle had different ideas than his mentor, Plato, having much in common could only be agreement. We cannot break all ties with the ancient Greeks and preserve reason and civilization. I’ve already made an example of the Constitution of the United States, but I believe more reason exists for a counterpoise to postmodernism and its variants than that alone. The distant future’s paradise is at stake. Aristotle’s emphasis on contemplation as the highest happiness is echoed by such recent works as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. A value that will stand the test of centuries yet to come. And one would consider Plato’s description of the blazing light of the form of the Good as like the desire Aristotle had of gazing into the light of God as the highest contemplation, the two philosophers not as disparate in their beliefs as they may usually seem. As quaint as the spiritual ideal may feel, it’s an awesome reality that may be achieved in our time.

A meeting with the world from the wider realm we call the great outdoors can be conducted at the perimeter—an encounter that “brings out” shadows, similarly as photographers refer to the procedure in postprocessing. The forms are there in things as an objective potential and removing shadow realizes them as beheld by the mind. A nifty integration of Plato’s disembodied forms and Aristotle’s belief in forms being in things. Because in my conception of the encounter, things are objective, but their forms don’t exist entirely independent of perception.

          Witness ultimately does better than observe. It generates value from reality’s inward potential within both human and existential being. The Microlight Quest attempts to strip back the darkness eclipsing the highest vantage, while remaining true not only to the obtaining of down-to-earth values, but to the mood of rebellion against the proletarian urge inherent in a working-class life. The book’s persuasion insists on more than a job can offer.