When you grew up in an unmapped, unwired world and find yourself in this one - observing the panic when GPS fails or the extent of online status anxiety - you can’t help wondering if somewhere along the way freedom got lost.
Freedom is still out there. We all have our idea of it, the deferred dream. Your psyche builds layers of protection around your most vulnerable traits, which may be closely linked to that precious essence in which freedom resides. Freedom is inseparable from risk.
Technology increases choice, but its prime purpose is to increase productivity; that is the amount that can be extracted from you in any given time. Like debt, it never sleeps. It confines you. It distracts you. It binds you. It depoliticizes you through isolation and through the blurring, in the cacophony it delivers, of fantasy with fact.
I don’t know if the world is freer than a half-century ago. On paper, it is. The totalitarian Soviet Imperium is gone. The generals who bossed Latin America are gone, generally. Asia has unshackled itself and claims this century as its own. Media has opened out, gone social. Yet minds feel more cr imped, fear more pervasive, possibility more limited, adventure more choreographed, politics more stale, economics more skewed, pressure more crushing, escape more elusive.
Three things recently caused me to ponder these matters. The first was the appearance, like a letter in a bottle, of a diary from 1973, recording a time when I was in Afghanistan as a 17-year-old hippie. The second was reading “Barbarian Days,” William Finnegan’s wonderful surfing memoir. The third was a question from my son. I’ll take them in order. The diary, written by Leslie Starr, covers three weeks that, as a young woman, she spent with me in Kabul, Bamian (its Buddhas still intact), Band-e-Amir and Mazar-i-Sharif. Starr, from Annapolis, traveled in a VW Kombi, named Pigpen after the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead, that I had driven with two friends to Afghanistan. It took her only 43 years to transcribe her jottings and so reverse time’s arrow.
There I am, on Aug. 2, 1973, my 18th birthday, in a cave beside the beautiful lakes of Band-e-Amir, “propped against bundles, surrounded by chickens, beautiful children, a kitten, a goat, women in the corners” eating. There, the next day, on the “terrible road” from Bamian to Mazar, “zooming, crashing along into the night.” There again, on August 10, at the Salang Pass (12,723 feet), camped out and cold with the engine bust. The next day, “we coasted 40 kilometers, stopped in desperation.” Back in Kabul, I try a cake of, let us say, Colorado inspiration. It packs a punch. Starr writes, “During the night I heard Roger talking to Marcus about dying.” Oh, man. She observes these three young men “about to enter Oxford” who “sit around and write in notebooks or read Turgenev.”
I’m struck by the haphazardness of that journey; the fact we drove across Iran; the way names likes Mazar and the Salang Pass have become synonymous with war; the idea of us teenagers thousands of miles from our parents, out of contact. How much freer, in many ways, we were. I don’t think it’s that the world’s more dangerous. I think it’s that people are more frightened. Fear is a much-trafficked commodity.
Which brings me to Finnegan’s wonderful book, a k ind of hymn to freedom and passion. Freedom is inside you. It’s the thing that cannot be denied. For Finnegan, that’s surfing and writing. “How could you know your limits unless you tested them?” he asks - a question as true before the ferocious energy of the wave as before the infinite possibilities of the written form.
He’s a near contemporary, embracing Kerouac and the Dead, contemptuous of what a friend calls “Suckcess,” hitting the road without a map to find the perfect wave somewhere between Guam and Cape Town, a child of a zeitgeist he describes as “hippie culture, acid rock, hallucinogens, neo-Eastern mysticism, the psychedelic aesthetic.” Like me he laments the loss of the lost places, the beaches he was first to tread.
A patch of coast may demand a lifetime of study. Wave love, he observes, “is a one way street.” The wave, implacable, will turn on you. “Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.” One near escape produces this catharsis: “On my knees in the sand, in the twilight, absolutely spent, I was surprised to find myself sobbing.”
What my son Blaise, who is 21, asked was whether it’s still possible to have such adventures. He thought not - too much control, too much Google Earth. I suggested he might be wrong and that, on graduation, he might drive from New York to Patagonia. It’s important to experience that “ferocious ambivalence,” the threshold of freedom.
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ROGER COHEN>
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