Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is a little book -- just over 130 pages. It's quiet and introspective. It is perfection unchained:
It's OK, you know, up to about the sixth grade. Nobody really cares, least of all yourself. The teachers are mostly pretty nice to you, because you're easy to teach. Some of them love you for it, and give you neat books for extra reading. Some of them resent it, but they're too busy with the Behavior Problem types to have time to really make you feel lousy for being ahead of the others in math and reading. And there's always a few other kids, usually girls, who are as smart as you are, or smarter, and you and they write the class skits, and make lists for the teacher, and so on. And besides, for all the talk about how cruel little kids are, they haven't got a patch on older people for cruelty. Little kids are just dumb, the smart ones and the slow ones. They do dumb things. They say what they think. They haven't learned yet to say what they don't really think. That comes later, when kids begin to turn into people and find out that they are alone.
I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups--clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. You have to be with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friends' friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teen-ager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe.
And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their blue jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.
I had to force myself to stop typing. I wanted to include the next paragraph and the next and the next, but there's that whole copyright thing. So go out and find a copy.
It came out in 1976 -- the year before I was born -- but it still rang true to me, resonated with my memories of high school. I think it'll always be true.
Comments