With the cold granite of the exterior walls exposed from the inside and the modern conveniences of electricity and plumbing disconnected for the early phases of reconstruction, the wind gusted through closed century-old windows as if through the glass itself. Just near enough for me to see the froth, waves cascaded a chill across the rocky New England shoreline, and it tumbled as wind along the frosted hill and hardened a still, man-made pond.
Alone in the gutted basement, previously servants’ quarters of an old Newport mansion, I’d pause in my carpentry from time to time to listen for the echoes of the long-laid hammers of the builders, whose marks were visible in the old lumber. They’d driven handmade nails into studs and subfloor boards by the thousand, and it seemed as if the rapping might yet be audible beneath the hum of the CD player cycling through Bach adagios and the scream of metal in wood as I pried the materials apart. In the rasp of my own breath, as I worked, I could hear my predecessors’ saws scraping back and forth across the aromatic fir, cutting two-by-fours that were actually two-by-four.
When I needed fresh lumber, a cell phone and a truck would bring shipments to the job site, and although the numbers by which I described the boards’ dimensions were the same, they were mere representations—at best, denoting the width and thickness that the rough-cut lengths had been before machines had planed them down, smooth and standardized, a half-inch lost in each direction.
Plane as we may, wood’s a stubborn thing. Its twisting habits wreak quickly from within what the burden of external weight takes decades to accomplish, and often I found it more efficient to clean and reuse the materials that I’d inherited from those who’d compiled the structure before me.
Around the time when the workers who’d built the mansion were born, new notions of man’s nature were being formed. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-reliance” (1841). The carpenters’ fellow New Englander explained: “Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.”
Through the plying of such memorable phrases, the likes of Mr. Emerson made individuality provable only by forcing others to stoop in order to communicate. Between the years that the mansion’s foundation grew out of the waterfront ledge and the morning that I gazed through the rippled, sagging glass of its lower apertures, that principle spread as rot, with each generation striving to know less, culturally, than the previous. Transcendence beyond the need for strictures and forms had crumbled into a rejection of the very suggestion that one must understand convention in order to tweak it meaningfully.
Thus the peculiarity of our time is that one must, in essential philosophy, be conservative to be contrarian. The practice of my hands taught me to disassemble servants’ quarters and build spacious apartments in their place; exercise of the mind brought discernment that Western culture had so thoroughly deconstructed itself as to risk lacking the materials to rebuild. To capture the individualist’s liberty, one must give the past its due and understand that freedom comes from self-mastery, not—as Emerson averred—from “the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner.” Nonconformity for its own sake is just conformity for the sake of something else—a something that others are ever too anxious to supply.
I came to this conclusion through painful experience as a specialist in falling through cracks. A lifelong observer might be justified in claiming that I ran from one posture to another, rebelling against the entire culture one segment at a time. From an internal perspective, it felt more accurate that my differences discomfited inhabitants of every niche along the spectrum.
Born into a world dominated by the Me Generation and raised in a Northeastern culture contemptuous of the yuppie daydreams of the era, even as its every household pined for the markers of material success, I learned liberalism as a pose. The sixties and seventies provided a social script that the properly educated were compelled to follow. Out among the people, President Reagan was simultaneously acknowledged as the best man for the job and targeted as an appropriate subject for mockery. That was just the way it was supposed to work: revere by breaking down and break down that which others revere. Pop culture fed us the opinions that we were supposed to have, and I was disinclined to challenge them.
One could spin the fact as either a slight or a compliment, but I found myself especially susceptible to the confusions of the time. A classroom of girls advised me on the image that might transform me into a datable teen bachelor—sweaters from Britches in the North Jersey mall and pants from the Gap, hair cut in the soft-spiked style of the day—yet found me too risky to date themselves. The crowd of Different People with whom I shared an interest in music could not abide my preppy wardrobe. The contemporary crowd of Outsiders, conversant in cars and drugs, were embarrassed by my poor constitution for illicit substances, and the students with whom I shared the upper percentiles of academic achievement were unnerved by my lust for experimentation, which I pursued with the vague sense that the very next combination of attributes that I’d try would be the one to make sense of my life.
Adulthood taught the lesson that the personal becomes professional when at last one’s dinner no longer arrives with the dependent’s surety. After the disastrous discovery that I lacked the balance for the well-trodden progression from high school to college, I dropped out for a detour through two years of labor selling fish off a truck in suburbia before returning to higher education, philosophically firm … as a conservative. Professors, albeit enjoying the spar during class, exhibited no interest in my offer of an ideologically divergent protégé. And, in any case, the graduate schools to which I applied en route to the life of a college professor looked past the encouraging evidence of grades, standardized test scores, and recommendations, to the subversive fealty to tradition and common sense, conveyed in my writing samples. In them, they found excuse to deny my applications.
Forced back into the working world, I accepted my allotted gray office cubicle outside of Boston and rehearsed the polite redirection of conversation when others wrongly assumed that I was of like mind. Self-expression I buried in a rotating stack of manuscripts, sending poetry and fiction to be rejected and returned and sent and rejected and returned. With frustration thus wound, I once again spun away from the assistance of others and took to self-publishing literary reviews for a local writers’ group to which I belonged—editing, designing, fund-raising, and printing each edition almost entirely on my own initiative.
Through that effort, I glimpsed the world that awaits those willing to scrape away the frictional aspects of their worldviews and slip smoothly into a cultural Lethe. Public grants, donations, and sympathetic advertising might float to those who take care not to ripple the waters, and I must confess a deep temptation to be still. When 9/11 thrust political convictions to the tip of my pen, however, the tide turned me away.
It would deny reality, of course, to insist that rigid conformity ceases at ideological boundaries. Human beings are naturally more comfortable among those with whom we agree, and with limited resources to sort all candidates, such comfort will always bear on the chosen beneficiaries of our opportunities. But those paths toward which I’ve always inclined, the clichéd “roads less traveled,” our culture has long characterized as pursuits of the Left, and the redoubts of open-mindedness and overt independence—in the arts, in academia, in media—have been jealously guarded.
Nonconformity, if it is not to be synonymous with perpetual adolescence and social disengagement, depends on principles that are now to the right of center. Innovation requires an emphasis on merit-driven results, determined by the mechanisms of a free market. By contrast, direct authorities—central planners and experts—who allocate resources and determine individuals’ roles in the society inevitably mandate conformity, even if their banner recalls a rebel pose. Look only to the unbroken theme of the modern antihero—self-destructive habits—for evidence that a constitutional conformity, not individual self-realization, is the objective of the secular progressive movement.
The truly self-reliant must adhere to a deeper reality, with threads whose value they understand more as a matter of faith than of comprehension. They must master the language in order to speak an elegant rebellion more profound than empty statements of “I rebel.” They must determine how a structure resists the forces that would destroy it before they can challenge the principles of its construction. And they must feel the unique human heartbeat behind each exertion in order to believe in the competence of the individual in the first place.
Such heartbeats practically throbbed beneath my hands in the timbers of that old mansion by the sea. Crawling through the barely passable corridors of the elaborate roof system, cutting holes for the modern mechanisms of climate control, I was warmed, as it were, by the very breaths of men whose hands had been the last to touch the rafters generations before, not long after the United States’ internal war of unity and freedom and not long before the next century turned toward atrocities of central planning and inhuman calculations of human worth.
By the nature of his work, the carpenter has an experiential understanding that he cannot disregard the traditions of his craft. He values them as the very air he breathes, else the structure will collapse. By virtue of his labor, he also knows that no nail is driven of its own volition, and in volition exists personality.
The windows that provided me cold light for my work were once the cherished task of the workshop. Each sash had its fine details and tightly fit joints, ensconced in careful balances of measurement and weight to be functional. The wood and glass, pointed and glazed against the weather, were balanced across pulleys with iron cylinders hidden within the hollow jambs. Behind each detail was a man saddle-sitting at his bench, tapping carefully shaped chisels. With each opening and closing, the rattle of the weights speaks of the window’s maker and lifetimes of experience, though even his grandchildren have gone to their graves.
Interpreting the manner of construction, I concluded that the crew installed the windows as they stacked the walls of stone and brick, attaching strips of wood on both sides before fitting the frames into their openings. As the masons completed each level of the structure, they’d pour concrete along the windows’ sides, securing them in place with mud that would turn to stone around wooden strips. It was the evidence of the workers that gave the method away: if the laborer had poured too little water into the concrete mix, air gaps remained toward the bottom of the window because the mixture clumped rather than flowed. If his mix had been too wet, the concrete bled out beneath. Even in such simple activities, we cannot help but leave our marks.
So, let some well-heeled transcendentalist proclaim that nonconformity is the precondition of self-fulfillment. He provides but the last link of the chain: it is, in turn, a precondition of nonconformity to do something; in doing something, one must necessarily conform to steps and strategies learned and taught, and judging well among the possibilities is itself an exercise in conformity with criteria of wisdom.
Across the centuries, the truth has remained that an infant is not, in fact, self-reliant but wholly reliant, and the adults will tire of cooing for the child’s entertainment if he or she fails to mature. We, the newly grown, can hope that prior generations’ experiment in inverted lessons of maturity will fade to echoes once we turn from the walls that they’ve exposed and seek an outward view. Then, in true and good nonconformity, we can rebuild.