Robert Root

 

"What can we learn," Joshua Rothman wonders in a New Yorker essay, "by asking if we've always been who we are? . . . Are you the same person you were as a child?" Questions worth asking but answering them requires knowing who you were as a child and who you are now and figuring out how to determine whether those two identities are the same or different. I return to Rothman's challenge to readers: "Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall." A typical fall day in my childhood quickly arose in memory, but I needed to get inside that skinny blonde kid, not just conjure him from photographs or recall the places and people he recognized outside himself.

 

As a child I was a relentless reader who tended to create adventure stories where I pretended to be a superhero of some kind or a western hero of some kind or a Robin-Hoody/Zorro-ishy swashbuckler of some kind. What I read in comic books or comic strips or heard on the radio fired my imagination towards variations that suited my preferences. I never imagined myself playing sports and seldom attended sporting events or watched them on TV. Hanging out with friends I preferred donning a costume like those worn by action stars and pretending to overcome various villains. We never played on opposing teams trying to beat one another—we were always the good guys. When hiking across town and climbing trees in Outwater Park, I tried to emulate Tarzan's movements from tree to tree or ducked into the only cave-like space on the hillside to hide out or pretended a shootout in the cemetery made me leap (or at least clamber) over tombstones.

 

Reading, viewing, listening, and writing isolated me. My neighborhood friends didn't go to my elementary school and had other friends elsewhere; I had a lot of time to myself. I often claimed to be sick and stayed home from school catching up on my reading and imagining myself to be someone else. I had my own bedroom, my own radio and record player, and the solitude to sing along with teen performers and share their lyrical emotions without indulging in lifestyles the songs implied.

 

Somehow I got through high school and college and became a high school English teacher—still writing all the while, mostly short stories, one very short high school novel, a college newspaper column, reviews and poems—and went on to grad school, where I took up creative nonfiction as a scholar and an essayist/memoirist. I taught composition and creative nonfiction for almost thirty years, published academic articles and books, and eventually concentrated on composing literary nonfiction.

 

My essays and memoirs were largely either about where I'd been and what I'd done there or about other writers and what they'd written about. That seems very much like an extension of what I'd been doing when I was young, learning from what I'd read or viewed or listened to and imagining myself as one of those people. In youth I had modeled myself on Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran; in adulthood I connected to Ruth Douglass, Isabella Bird, John Muir, and others. My literary studies angled towards dramatists and essayists whose work appealed to me most, often less celebrated than others, or whom I identified with more, like the Restoration dramatist Thomas Southerne, E. B. White as an essayist, and nature writers Aldo Leopold and August Derleth.

 

When I consider the adjectives that would best describe me as a youth, I think of these: withdrawn, solitary, reserved, self-absorbed, shy. Over the intervening decades I had to learn to be (or to at least seem) more sociable, approachable, cheerful, and outgoing. All these later traits were necessary developments for me to become a lecturer, classroom teacher, scholastic advisor, husband, and father. I've been mostly comfortable in those roles and certainly the happiest.

 

But it occurs to me that those traits aren't ones that define me for myself. I'm now a retiree, almost exclusively an aged homebody, and my most outward-seeming behavior is what I'm doing here: writing about what I've been reading, reacting to ideas that circumstances have suggested I might think about. My social life is limited—it doesn't often occur to me to get in touch with anyone (I receive almost no personal mail or email and mostly post only a "like" in reaction to others' Facebook posts, seldom a comment, almost never a judgement.)

 

So to Joshua Rothman I guess I'd reply (if I had to) that I'm pretty much the same person I was as a child, despite accommodations that growing up has influenced me to willingly accept. That's who I am. That's okay.

 

Notes: Rothman, Joshua. "Becoming You". The New Yorker (October 10, 2022: 20-24)

 

One of the habits I've maintained over the years when we've spent autumn weeks in Florida has been, on our return to Wisconsin, to pile unread back issues of our subscriptions on living room tables and gradually set about making sure I've perused each issue before I recycle it. Naturally, after we've come home this year, new issues have been arriving to be added to the stacks. As usual, it's unlikely that we will be up to date in our reading before winter sets in. I won't read everything in every issue, of course, but sometimes I need to tear out an article to reconsider a few times more after the rest of the contents have been disposed of. That's how I come to be contemplating an essay from a mid-October issue in the second week of November.

 

The subtitle of Joshua Rothman's New Yorker article "Becoming You" asks, "Are you the same person you were when you were a child?" and claims early on, "If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives." He eventually asks, "What can we learn by asking if we've always been who we are?" It's not a question everyone feels the need to ask themselves, since who we are today seems so much like who we were yesterday and who we expect to be tomorrow, but it can get you remembering your sense of self at various stages of your life.

 

Rothman refers to some long-term studies that attempt to gauge stasis and mutation in personality and/or character and/or sense of identity over time. One that originated in New Zealand examined the same thousand-plus individuals over a forty-year period to assess how they "have changed over the decades" and compared them to thousands more subjects studied in the United States and the United Kingdom. He also considers a series of documentaries begun by the cinematographer Michael Apted which focused on the same individuals every seven years between 1964 and, so far, 2019, ranging from "Seven Up!" to "63 Up." The subjects were initially grouped in relevant categories, and changes in those categories noted as they emerge. Rothman remarks that, "as the series has progressed, the chaos of individuality has encroached on the clarity of characterization."

 

Readers of Rothman's article are given a challenge: "Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall." The article is in an October issue, after all, and looking out your window at your surroundings may help trigger your memories. Certainly, after glancing out at my present surroundings, I automatically flashed to my childhood neighborhood in western New York, the trees in our yard and my grandparents' yard and our neighbors' yards, and the fallen leaves everywhere and memories of my friends and I leaping into piles of them. The longer I recall those images, the more they expand my sense of being there, bringing back those neighbors and those playmates and those relatives, and the feel of the weather, and of eventually being old enough to be assigned to rake those leaves and pile them on the curb for city crews to pick up. Rothman's challenge for such memories is this: "Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?" That is, how close or how distant do you feel from the individual in your memory, the one you're certain was you?

 

Prompting memory to go off in search of younger, potentially different versions of myself certainly surfaces a variety of different images, mostly from that neighborhood and from the elementary school I attended and the nearby streets and stores and the park behind our house. Much of what surfaces is external: other people's faces and behavior, the surroundings that provide a background for their actions, some unintended shifts in seasons. The challenge is to turn my perspective around and envision my reactions to what those images display at the time I first saw them, first lived in them. At the moment, I'm not sure I can follow the linkage from who I was as a second or third grader jumping into leaf piles, running home from school, obsessed with Bomba the Jungle Boy and Davy Crockett and Robin Hood and superhero comic books, to the elderly author/professor retiree I am now, scribbling these thoughts. Have I changed? How often? How much? How? Rothman concludes, "We change, and change our view of that change, for as long as we live." He may be right, but I'll need to contemplate a lot more memories—reinhabit my earlier self more fully and frequently—to confidently agree.

 

 

Notes: Rothman, Joshua. "Becoming You" by Joshua Rothman. The New Yorker (October 10, 2022: 20-24)