On Trails (45 page)

Reading these lines, I can't help but think of Eberhart, nearing his eighth decade on this planet, sleeping on the hard ground. (“Oh, my arthritic, bony old body,” he wrote in his journal one cold desert night in West Texas. “I'll be listening to it complain, for sure.”) This is what is left when the haze of romance has burned away. This is the cost of freedom. Every year, the lone, lean life grows harder. “Up high,” Han-shan wrote, “the trail turns steep.” And yet he went on climbing.

I had gone in search of Eberhart, the modern nomad, to see what my life might have looked like if I had chosen to pursue the life of simplicity a long trail affords. Walking with him, I witnessed both the advantages and disadvantages of a life honed down to a single point: the finer the edge, the more brittle the blade. Eberhart had opted for the path toward maximal freedom, which meant shunning comfort, companionship, and security: he may have to sleep on the ground, but he can sleep anywhere he likes. If he gets sick or injured, he may well die, but, he figures, at least he'll die outdoors.

“It is pleasant to be free,” wrote Aldous Huxley, who, like Eberhart, for years owned little more than an automobile and a few books. “But occasionally, I must confess, I regret the chains with which I have not loaded myself. In these moods I desire a house full of stuff, a plot of land with things growing on it; I feel that I should like to know one small place and its people intimately, that I should like to have known them for years, all my life. But one cannot be two incompatible things at the same time. If one desires freedom, one must sacrifice the advantages of being bound.”

Freedom, in other words, has its own constraints. Snipping what
Han-shan called “the world's ties” can come as a relief—from the demands of a job, the constant upkeep of a house, even the obligations of friends or family—but those same ties are often what give our lives meaning and provide a buffer against calamity. Sacrifice is unavoidable.

Whether or not we agree with their choices, the dedication these men have to living a free life presents us with an unsettling question: What do we value above all? Is there anything we hold as dear as Eberhart and Han-shan hold their freedom? And to gain it, what would we be willing to lose? What wouldn't we? And then what does that tell us about what we
really
value above all?

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Old age brings with it another kind of liberation: freedom from the doubt, angst, and restlessness of youth. The old can look back and see their decisions as a single concatenation, sheared of all the ghostly, untaken routes. Heidegger, a forest-dwelling philosopher enchanted with the earthy wisdom of the
Feldweg
(field path) and the
Holzweg
(wood path), discussed his life in this manner. Three years before his death, he wrote to his friend Hannah Arendt: “Looking back over the whole path, it becomes possible to see that the walk through the field of paths is guided by an invisible hand, and that essentially one adds little to it.” But he was able to make that judgment only with the benefit of hindsight. Fate is an optical illusion. From the vantage of a thirty-year-old like me, life's path still bristles with spur trails and possible dead ends.

And so we return, once again, to the essential question: How do we select a path through life? Which turns should we take? To what end?

To be able to answer these questions, deftly and with foresight, is what we mean when we say someone is
wise
. Wisdom—not intelligence, not cleverness, not even moral goodness, but wisdom
—
is what guides us through the unknown. Perhaps the word
wisdom
sounds hoary to your ear. (Indeed, it does to mine.) As the philosopher Jim Holt has written, it has fallen out of vogue with philosophers
in recent decades; the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
notes that “wisdom has come to vanish almost entirely from the philosophical map.” Ancient philosophers defined wisdom as a way to “maximize the good.” However, contemporary philosophers have shied away from discussing wisdom, because they view it as an overly “value-­saturated concept.” “It is not that philosophers are daunted or bored by wisdom,” Holt writes. “Rather, they have concluded that there is no single right balance of elements that constitutes ‘the good life for man,' and hence no unitary value that wisdom can help us maximize.”

He goes on:

Suppose you are torn between dedicating your life to art (say, by becoming a concert pianist) or to helping others (say, by going to medical school and joining Doctors Without Borders). How do you decide? There is no common currency in which artistic creation and moral goodness might be compared; these are but two of a plurality of incommensurable values that can be realized in a human life. Do you then ask yourself which choice will bring you greater future happiness? That's no good either, for the path you choose will shape the very person you become, along with the preferences you develop; so to base your decision on the satisfaction of those preferences would be circular.

It is time, I believe, to return to the question of wisdom, but to approach it from a new angle. As Holt points out, wisdom is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but I think we can safely describe it as
a time-tested means of choosing how to live.
The element of time is essential. There is a valid reason that, across millennia and across cultures, wisdom has always been considered the province of old people and old books. Likewise, it is no coincidence that many of the transcultural markers of human wisdom (patience, equanimity, foresight, compassion, impulse control, an ability to reside in uncer
tainty) are exactly those qualities which children notably lack. Wisdom is a rarified form of intelligence born of experience, the result of carefully testing your beliefs against reality. You make an attempt at solving a problem, and sometimes you stumble upon success; other times you make mistakes, and then you correct them. Over time you learn, you adapt, you grow. In other words, wisdom is a form of judgment that
evolves
.

The notion that wisdom must contain subjective values (must prize, for example, moral purity over artistic virtue, or vice versa) is a specious one. Wisdom is the means by which entities reach their varied ends—by which they gain power or create beauty or help others. Wisdom is structural, not ethical. (Machiavelli, for example, was one very wise, very unethical
figlio di puttana
.) In fact, I would argue that all very old things attain a certain kind of wisdom. There is, if we were to look closely enough, a wisdom of trees and a wisdom of seagrass, a wisdom of mountains and a wisdom of rivers, a wisdom of planets and a wisdom of stars. This book, in its admittedly oblique and winding way, has been a search for the wisdom of trails. It is the wisdom required to reach one's ends while making one's way across an unknown landscape, whether it be a sandy seafloor, a new field of knowledge, or the full expanse of a human life. It is deeply human, this wisdom, deeply animal—and it has tremendous bearing on our personal and collective future.

Wisdom is measured by function. Trails that fulfill the needs of their walkers get used, and used trails persist. Those qualities that lead to greater use, and greater longevity, naturally become the essence of a trail's wisdom. One of the reasons that trails are so relevant to the modern human condition is that they are fervently open-minded: a wise trail can go anywhere and carry anyone. However, every trail is not as wise as every other trail; nondiscrimination is not the same thing as radical relativism. Any forest walker can tell you this—some trails simply
work better.
We can then wonder: Are there some qual
ities that wise trails—the trails that get better with time—hold in common?

I will venture a guess, which I hope will be improved by others in the future. What unites the wisest trails, I have found, is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, and flexibility. If a trail has only one of these qualities it will not persist for long: a trail that is too durable will be too fixed, and will fail when conditions change; a trail that is too flexible will be too flimsy, and will erode; and a trail that is too efficient will be too parsimonious, and so will lack resilience. The pheromone trails that ants make, for example, brilliantly balance durability and flexibility: they last long enough to lead other ants to a food source but fade quickly enough to allow new paths to form. And ants invariably find the most efficient route, but then wisely temper that route with redundant detours, ensuring a backup plan in case the best route suddenly fails. The result is a trail that is not just time-tested, as we often say, but
world-tested
. Or perhaps even more precisely, the trail is in a constant state of world-test
ing
, adapting to the world even as its conditions change.

Without ever naming it as such, humans have been putting the wisdom of trails to great use since our inception as a species. Science, technology, storytelling: all masterfully exploit the supple wisdom of trails. Our many forms of understanding the world resemble nothing so much as the trail-wise problem-solving of ants: We test multiple theories against the complexity of the world, and then pursue those that work. The better routes last, the worse ones erode, and little by little those that work improve.

It is in this trail-wise manner that we most effectively navigate a world of forking paths. Holt's hypothetical person, for instance, could conceivably research both paths before making a fateful decision. She could pursue both ideals, making forays into each field (long hours spent at the piano; introductory classes in medicine), to suss out which better suits her abilities and proclivities. Holt
astutely points out that her goals and values will shift depending on which path she takes. So let her explore both, and see how each begins to shape her. In case she fails at one pursuit or finds it unsatisfying, she can leave herself open to pursuing the other, or some new offshoot she may have never otherwise discovered. Wisdom often wanders: St. Augustine, Siddhārtha, Li Po, Thomas Merton, Maya Angelou—the insight of each was deepened by a wild and meandering youth. “Seeking and blundering are good,” wrote Goethe, “for it is only by seeking and blundering we learn.”

Indeed,
some
blundering is good. But a lifetime of blundering—to be condemned to a pathless wilderness—would be a nightmare. Fortunately, we do not wander alone. This is where the other half of a trail-wise way of life comes to the fore: The brilliance of trails stems from the fact that they can preserve the most fruitful of our own wanderings, as well as the wanderings of others; then, as those paths are followed, their wisdom further improves and spreads. Likewise, through collaboration and communication, personal wisdom is transformed into collective wisdom.

As the author and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1904, the thrust of human history thus far has been to develop “lines of connection,” which ultimately add up to what she called the “social organism”:

Watch the lines of connection form and grow, ever thicker and faster as the Society progresses. The trail, the path, the road, the railroad, the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural delivery; thus Society is held together. Save for the wilful hermit losing himself in the wilderness, every man has his lines of connection with the others; the psychic connection, such as “family ties,” “the bonds of affection,” and physical connection in the path from his doorstep to the Capital city.

The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social stimulus and impulse.

More than a hundred years later, these words have proven surprisingly prescient. Gradually, our collective intelligence has grown—­beyond communities, beyond countries, beyond even our own species. Every day, humans carry on conversations across oceans and intuit the intentions of other organisms, weaving a diverse array of needs into a broader plan of action; in this way, we are slowly transcending ourselves. At the same time, our ability to alter the environment—to change the chemical makeup of the sea and sky, to snuff out whole ecosystems—is growing radically as well. The question remains whether the growth of our collective wisdom can keep pace with our capacity for destruction, whether all of us—“walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together”—can cooperate to reach our mutual aims.

Over the course of millennia, our first tentative trails have sprawled into a global network, allowing individuals to reach their ends faster than ever before. But one unintended consequence of this shift has been that many of us now spend much of our lives within a world made up of little more than connectors and nodes, desire lines and objects of desire. The danger of such a blinkered existence is that the more effectively these trails deliver us to our ends, the more they can insulate us from the world's complexity and flux, which results in structures that are dangerously fragile, fixed, or myopic. No matter how vast our collective wisdom grows, we would also be wise not to forget how small it is in comparison to the broader universe. “The attempt to make order out of disorder and chaos,
tohu va vohu
, is the essence of every human life,” a wise old man named Baruch Marzel once told the essayist David Samuels. “But stories are never the truth. The truth is chaos.”

The old man is right, but this is only half the story. The ontological truth—the deep reality of the world—is chaos. But the pragmatic truth—the truth we can actually use, the truth that leads us somewhere—is chaos refined. The former is a wilderness, the latter is a path. Both are essential; both are true.

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Han-shan died more than a thousand years ago, yet we know what little we do about him because, throughout the seven decades of his hermitage, he wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poems. Forgoing paper, he scribbled his thoughts on trees and rocks and cliffs and the walls of buildings, sometimes, one imagines, graffitiing descriptions of the landscape directly onto the landscape itself. (Some three hundred of these poems were ultimately transcribed and preserved by imperial officials.) In a poem written late in his life, Han-shan recalled visiting a village he'd once lived in seventy years prior. All the people he'd known were now dead and buried. Only he was left. The poem concludes with a proclamation: