Not New York

“Where will you be next year?”

*ONLY ONE DAY REMAINS — submissions for the first New Critic essay contest are due Wednesday, May 27th! On the occasion of our graduation, the New Critic founding editors seek a proper commencement address — one that answers “What Was College For?” The winning essay receives a $1,000 prize!*

Kit Knuppel

Declan Rexer is a 23-year-old writer from New York City. He studies in the Fundamentals Program at The University of Chicago and is an alumnus of Deep Springs College.

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My friends don’t ask me how I’m doing anymore. Instead, they ask, “Where will you be next year?” with the kind of slowly escaping grin that makes it clear they eagerly expect the question to be returned their way. This little charade would be cute if it wasn’t so repetitive, for the answer, I’ve found, is almost always the same. I’m a graduating senior at The University of Chicago, where nearly two-thirds of graduates find themselves entering the fields of finance or consulting. I asked a friend recently if he knew anyone not moving to what seem to be our country’s four “magnet” cities: New York, Boston, D.C., or San Francisco. He thought for a minute and then asked, “Does New Jersey count?”

My friends have read the stacks of literature about young people paralyzed by the decisions that stand before them, budding graduates struck dumb by the enormity of a uniquely modern weight: that we get to forge our own destiny, that ours is a world where what we are is what we make ourselves out to be. But unlike the listless military officers, tuberculosis-envying sanatorium patients, whale-chasing shipmen, or train-hopping beatniks of yore, our generation of college graduates has gotten its shit together. Following the advice of an army of career counselors and advisors, our generation has written our cover letters, tapped our “connections,” and leaped not toward adventure but toward security (financial and otherwise). I worry that in doing so, we’ve opted out of the kind of experiences by which one comes to distinguish oneself, discover one’s place, and thereby leave their youth behind them. I worry that, tucked away in the familiar comforts of the magnet city, our generation of marching professionals has yet to fully come of age.

There’s a frictionlessness to early career life in the magnet city. It is the logical next step, where the pipeline spits us out, where we wind up if we diligently attend to our studies and follow everyone’s advice. Friends who have moved to New York tell me elatedly that “this is where everyone is!” But such statements seem to betray a hidden anxiety that secretly, we’re afraid to leave the university ethos — its center-of-things, with-the-grain, inconsequentially heady sensibility.

It’s true that there are meaningful differences between city and college life. And nobody would confuse the tech-hype of the Bay Area or the cultural pageantry of New York for the speaking-in-paragraphs, professorial gravitas of the university. But one gets the sense that though the magnet city is not positioned within academia, it’s not entirely outside of it, either. Even its problems — a ridiculously high cost-of-living, ungodly work hours, and tiny apartments — have a familiarity to them, which is to say, they have a way of leading one into a rhythm of living (inhabiting a den of roommates, eating ramen-noodle dinners, and pulling all-nighters) that feels remarkably baccalaureate.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a romance to this kind of living. But there is also something about it that feels undeniably…stunted. It’s as if we’ve opted to soften the lines between adolescence and adulthood, as if our eagerness to succeed lulls us into a holding pattern in which our constant busyness justifies our refusal to put down more substantial roots.

A few weeks ago, I visited an old friend of mine who proudly and pointedly bucked this trend last year by moving to a small city in Iowa, where he serves as one quarter of the area’s local newspaper. His friends raised their eyebrows at the time but remained largely supportive. “He’ll be starved for intellectual discourse out there,” they worried. “How will he keep himself sharp?” They all shared a common sentiment: “I give him a few months.”

These comments betrayed the flip-side of the usually chipper old University of Chicago dogma, that college isn’t for teaching you what to think, but how to think. What does it mean to imagine thought itself (what is supposed to be the universal human faculty, indeed the very basis of our common reason, let alone our democracy) as something not only taught, but requiring a college education? Does one really begin to regress the moment one’s student keycard stops opening neo-gothic doors, when parties stop becoming avenues for pontification, for one’s hot new take on Nietzsche’s place in The Magic Mountain? How does anyone think without the scaffolding of paper prompts, letter grades, and, of course, the professor’s approving nod? Is this what happened to our parents? Can one forget how to think?

My friend, however, is a stubborn bastard. So nearly a year later, I bought myself a round-trip Greyhound ticket, eager to see the man who proved the erudite naysayers wrong.

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“For Davenport?” I asked the bus station attendant.

“For what?” she asked back.

I checked my itinerary again. “The bus to Daven—err…to Iowa.”

She pointed toward a small coterie seated on their suitcases toward the far end of the bus station, just across from the K-9 special police unit and the huddled families of fully-garbed Mennonites. I thanked her and joined the queue, where a mother kissed her overwhelmed-looking teenage daughter goodbye and a pudgy, red-in-the-face man stood making quips to those who stood near him. He pointed at the station’s row of TVs, beaming with the kind of look that said “isn’t this great?” as his audience gave him a stiff smile and readjusted their headphones. This was no Chicago crowd.

No loudspeaker announced the boarding call, rather, an attendant emerged from the shadows and, Chiron-like, extended his hand, silently beckoning us to follow his lead. On the bus, there was some confusion as to whether or not to honor the assigned seats issued on our virtual tickets. The pudgy man approached someone who was stretched out across a whole row, apparently asleep. “Excuse me, I believe this is my seat,” he said. With impressive quickness, the driver mercifully put an end to this fiction, thundering over the bus’ crackling PA system in a curt, no-time-for-this-shit tone: “This is a Greyhound. There are no assigned seats, I don’t care what your ticket says. They are literally all the same.” We were off.

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Davenport, Iowa is no country town. Over 100,000 people live within its limits, which push up against the west bank of the Mississippi River and extend into the endless cornfields the state is famous for. Greater Davenport boasts an international airport, a military base, a nuclear power plant, two universities, and a Single-A baseball team. It was a powerhouse in the mid-century, a hub of train and tractor manufacturing and a key node for steamboat and barge transit along the Mississippi. This was the stretch of Iowa that a young Xi Jinping visited in an effort to better study American corn production. “You were the first people I met when I came to the United States,” the Chinese president remembered in a 2012 reunion address. “To me, you are America.”

The city is now dotted with the rusted skeletons of its abandoned industry. Its population is smaller now than it was in the ’80s — the decade its core industries packed up shop, exchanging their loyal multi-generation workforces for cheaper foreign ones. 8,000 residents followed suit, chasing work elsewhere. The bus trundled on toward the Iowa stateline; I wondered whether such a place would feel bitter, whether the fact that its heyday was well within living memory would only add to the sting.

I was greeted at the bus station by my friend’s beat-up green Nissan pickup truck. “Hey pal,” he said. “C’mon, let me give you a tour.”

We drove down razor-straight one-lane highways framed by fields of corn only just sewn. My friend cranked his truck’s engine to 70 and began crafting a narrative of life in his new home. I was corrected after reflexively saying how fresh the air smelled; he duly informed me that Iowa has the nation’s second-highest cancer rate due to its heavy pesticide usage. Later, he told me how digging into local “ag market” politics makes one see the rolling cornfields as more a materialization of market logic than pastoral scenery.

“Farmers are businessmen,” he told me. “They operate on razor-thin margins, which means they’re going to follow where the money is.”

I learned Iowa raises more pigs than any other state in the country. I also learned that despite this, I wouldn’t see any of them outside the truck window — they’re kept indoors, in giant, cement-floor buildings. As vectors for both avian- and human-sourced viruses, keeping pigs out of contact with the world outside was epidemiologically essential — let alone protection for a farmer’s bottom line.

My friend told me that none of the corn we’d drive by would ever be destined for human consumption. Rather, it would be gathered in vast quantities and turned into ethanol, which would then be cut into the state’s gasoline, thereby dropping the average statewide price a handful of cents a gallon. “It’s like this,” he said, gesturing at the rolling cornfields out the windshield, “all the way until you get to Nebraska. The vast majority is all just for ethanol.” Corn farmers do not bring their bushels to the city for market — there is no longer any business in that. They are better off liquidating their product into sludge and setting it on fire (in the belly of an internal combustion engine). The federal government even subsidizes them to do so.

My friend is no PETA sympathizer; we had pork for dinner that night — and for breakfast the next morning. I got the sense when he spoke of the farmers that he meant “businessmen” as a compliment. But his point was clear: If I was looking for a place that escaped the cultural and aesthetic problems of contemporary society, Iowa wasn’t it.

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We pulled in outside my friend’s apartment around the time the sun was setting. He lived alone in a handsome four-story, red-brick building. He showed me up the two flights of stairs to an apartment that had windows on three sides, which cast a mesmerizing orange light on his several walls of bookshelves. Outside, I could see a storm churning up in the far stretch of the extended flat horizon.

My friend juggled cooking dinner (the aforementioned pork) and monitoring the latest forecast, cursing his luck for not living above a tornado shelter. I joked that the tornado could flatten the whole city and his paper would be one of the few to give it substantive reporting.

As the stormclouds gathered, we went out for a beer in the city’s four-blocks-wide downtown. A flyer on one bar’s door informed us we’d missed 50-cent beer night by a day. I wanted to check to see if the flyer had the right decade. Our drinks came with free popcorn — that, at least, seemed to be a seven-day affair.

My friend told me about his beat — local business and politics — and how Davenport boasts an inexplicably exceptional art museum and used bookstore. He talked about how people know their mayor here, that local issues evidently garner enough interest to support two (albeit, by no means thriving) local print papers. We talked about how Davenport is an exceptionally young city — nearly half its population is under 35 — and that you could feel it.

But this was no salvation to the challenges modernity had posed for the city, my friend was careful to maintain. “Believe me,” he said, “there are plenty of problems.” I wanted to interrupt him and tell him what I saw: That here he was, living alone in an affordable apartment he paid for himself, driving his own truck, getting by with neither family, friends, nor “connections” in a place where he had to make his own way. He wrote for a small but devoted audience who trusted him to know what and who he talked about. And he directed his intellectual energy accordingly, learning where he was and what it meant to live there. Ethanol aside, it certainly seemed pretty exceptional to me.

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Allan Bloom writes in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, “When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.” Even the buildings reflected a dedication to a “higher purpose, not to necessity or utility…to something that might be an end in itself.” The university was for Bloom a fortress for the intellect. It permitted one to emancipate oneself from the ties of necessity and duty, and thereby afforded one the room to form oneself in the face of ideas.

This education was preparatory; the walls, the gothic towers, the freedom from necessity and utility were temporary. Students, Bloom observed, “can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular.” His task was to reveal to them the necessity of answering such a question. In their studies, students found that “their souls had spaces of which they were unaware and which cried out for furnishing.”

But crucially, while the ideas one encountered revealed to one the depth and breadth that their experiences could one day prove capable of amounting to — should they give it their whole attention and their whole heart — they did not constitute these experiences themselves. Saul Bellow, in Ravelstein, his unofficial portrait of Bloom’s life and pedagogy, phrased his friend’s question thus: “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?” One completed one’s Bloomian education only when one left the university. One’s answer to this question was the rest of one’s life.

I was surprised, reading this, how similar such a sentiment was to the likes of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born writer/philosopher/farmer. In his 1968 essay, “A Native Hill,” a then-young (if you can believe it) Berry recalled his decision to leave a tenure-track teaching post in the English department at NYU to return to his family’s ancestral farmland in rural Kentucky:

“I had reached the greatest city in the nation; I had a good job; I was meeting other writers and talking with them and learning from them; I had reason to hope that I might take a still larger part in the literary life of that place…[but] Kentucky was my fate — not an altogether pleasant fate…but one that I could not leave behind simply by going to another place, and that I therefore felt more and more obligated to meet directly and understand.”

In Kentucky, Berry identified for himself a calling with which to devote his intellectual energy — a calling outside the university walls, “in this modern democracy.” But his colleagues at the university struggled to comprehend his decision. As Berry writes, “There was the belief…that a place such as I came from could be returned to only at the price of intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis, the American countryside is Circe and Mammon.” Perhaps (his superior at the university condescends to him) he is just looking to return to his childhood, riding a wave of insubstantial sentimentality and nostalgia. But Berry insists his intellect gained a new, tangible sense of purpose in Kentucky, one with stakes in the world around him. His mode of thinking became tied to a common idiom — to history, to his neighbors. Berry writes, “What has become the usual order of things reversed itself with me; my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation.”

Thinking like this demands responsibility and duty — it is adult. It demands that one take their command of ideas and use it to fashion a world beyond one’s head, living and working for those around them. Face-to-face with this common world, one discovers what they are capable of. Only then do they complete their education.

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The Greyhound back was full to the brim. A man sitting behind me cursed out a (presumably now former) lover over the phone. The boy next to me furiously scrolled TikTok for five hours straight. It took nearly as long to reach the outer limits of Chicago as it did to make the rest of the journey back to the city center. The Blue Line taunted us out the window, rushing by in a thunder every 15 minutes. I checked my phone; the tornado in Davenport never materialized.

Back on campus, I donned a change of clothes and ducked into a panel discussion with several successful writers from various publications. They talked about “scenes.” They talked about the need for new and bold thought — and the even greater need for that thought to not come out of Brooklyn.

“If you’re going to start your own publication or find a new scene to write about, don’t come to New York,” one writer advised. The company of New York- and D.C.-based writers on the panel nodded their heads in agreement. “Go somewhere regional, maybe like Chicago.”

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