New Year's Resolutions

Peter Goodchild

OK, it's nearly July, not January, so I'm off by six months.

1 Learn Latin.
2 Re-read the "milestones."
3 Find a permanent apartment.
4 Find land to the north.
5 Find a teaching job.
6 Get some rest.

I started Latin in school at age 14 but took no more courses after that. I finally got to the point where I could read Jerome's Latin Bible without grabbing the dictionary too often, but the Bible is easy reading in any language. My best foreign language is French, but my German got better over the last year, thanks partly to Frau K. In Japan I had learned Japanese, and in the Middle East and elsewhere from 2008 to 2011 I learned Arabic, Chinese, and Thai, all at what I'd call the conversational level. But I finally decided that western and eastern history should really be regarded separately. That means a westerner should focus on learning Latin, English, French, and German, perhaps even skipping everything else.

The "milestones" are the ten books that encapsulate western culture, at least from a somewhat anglophile perspective: Jerome's Bible, Njal's Saga, Thoreau's Walden, Beston's Outermost House, Quiller-Couch's New Oxford Book of English Verse, Matthiessen's Oxford Book of American Verse, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Low), Malory's Works (ed. Vinaver), Loomis's Medieval Romances, and Yeats' Collected Poems.

I'll try to stop reading detective novels. They often start off exciting, but at the end I have about the same feeling I'd probably have if I'd eaten a pound of sugar non-stop. What I particularly dislike in them is their frequent referral to "popular culture": films and so-called music. Since nearly all of these things are forgotten a year later, does the writer also intend that detective novel also to be forgotten a year later?

But we certainly live in an age that has largely abandoned books. By the year 1999, publishers were selling nine books I'd written, but since then I've had nothing accepted. And in the twelve years of this century, not one book has been published, by any author, that will still be read ten years from now. Orwell would have loved such a scenario. (Whoops! Again I'm referring to books.)

I need another title for the manuscript I've been calling "The Coming Chaos." Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Finding an apartment. I've always hated apartments, but the monthly cost of an apartment seems to be only a fraction of the cost of living in the country, so I might do better to consider having an urban domicile, with or without a rural one. And I have to start considering the fact that a few years from now I might not be able to use my double-bitted axe to clear a hundred acres before breakfast every day. Where I'm living right now is not bad at all. It's big, clean, and above all quiet. I guess Oman was the final straw in my sanity, and I'm now utterly obsessed with quiet. Shell shock does that to people. But in the last couple of days I've been wondering if I should take advantage of what people tell me is my old age. I wonder if, at age 63 (nearly), I can get into some sort of low-rent habitation available to seniors -- although K tells me that seniors can also be noisy, because they're deaf and think everyone else should be cranking up the volume. Still, I like the idea of having a more "corporate" landlord, so that I don't have to worry about quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Find land to the north. All my life I've had various obsessions, most of which cancel one another out. Living "off in the bush" is one of them. Well, Thoreau speaks of Walden as an "experiment," so perhaps that's the word I should use. Not something to succeed or fail necessarily, but more like something to study. But Thoreau paid $28.125 (don't forget that "5") for his cabin. Nowadays the cost would be about 4,000 times greater. That may partly explain why I don't have such a property at the moment. The dreadful rise in human population is also a big problem: it seems that every square meter that can be lived on is already occupied. And all the "greenies" like Suzuki and the Sierra Club fail to mention that overpopulation -- and over-immigration, God help us -- is to blame for the lack of space.

Still, I may keep looking for that square meter of sanity. I noticed yesterday that a realtor is offering 100 acres of land near Lake Abitibi for less than $4,000. That area is part of Ontario's Clay Belt, a vast area of arable but unpopulated land. The reason it's unpopulated, however, can be seen in the following description: "There are seven months of snow, two months rain, and all the rest is black flies and mosquitoes."

Find a teaching job. Since returning to Canada a year ago, I've had major expenses and no income at all. I'd like to find some source of income, and I suppose teaching English is still my best route. It's just unfortunate that education has reached the same rock bottom as everything else, so any serious teaching methods are forbidden. I had an interview a few months ago, and one of the questions was, "What would you do to get students to like you?" What a question. If I wanted people to like me, I wouldn't have become a teacher. And then when I received my rejection letter, it contained a terrible mistake in grammar. Oh, well, what does grammar have to do with language?

Get some rest. Even if I lived for another hundred years I wouldn't be able to finish all the things on my many lists. I might as well relax. When I asked somebody once what she'd really like to do with her life, she said, "I'd like to do nothing. Nothing." And that was somebody who was in fact usually very busy. So I think the same. It would be nice not to accomplish plans, not to finish projects. Since this is the end of civilization anyway, why bother? Everything will get swept away by the wave of universal chaos. It would be nice to sit on a rock. It would be nice not to look at clocks or calendars. The Indian Buddhist sage Tilopa had "six words of advice," and the sixth was "rang sar bzhag": "Relax, right now, and rest."

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com