Elsewhere

Walking through the campus at KA is strangely unsatisfying. Not that it isn’t beautiful, for you see there is the carpet of neatly-tended green lawn providing a break from the scrubby ground of Jordan. But still, it is just so perfect and nice, and um, bland. Here’s what I love most about walking around the area of our sprawling campus: its edges. In this one corner of the campus the school ends abruptly, as a school should, surrendering gracefully and completely, to farms and fields beyond the walls. On the horizon loom the hills to which David the Psalmist looked for inspiration and strength and comfort. Walking around the edges of the campus provides me with that experience of exploring boundaries and thinking what lies beyond them.

I think I always liked exploring “edges.” In my childhood I loved going on walk-a-thons, and since we all know that my athletic prowess is limited, it wasn’t really for the exercise. In a 10-mile, or 30-mile walk-a-thon, you got to explore the edges of communities and since I couldn’t drive yet (in the pre-16 year old days) the walking let me go where I couldn’t otherwise.

I have thought about edges this week since last Friday our History Department had a potluck dinner and discussed Lois Lowry’s provocative novel, The Giver. In the book young Jonas, our protagonist, is beginning to look more deeply into the life that has been very superficial, beginning to see that his own past goes back farther than he had ever known and has greater implications than he had ever suspected. Lowry writes: “…now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.”

In those prepubescent days before I had the all-mighty driver’s license, I rode my bike all over Cincinnati, riding through unfamiliar neighborhoods just to see what was there and who lived there. Every time I read The Giver (I think this was my 8th read) I find wonderful parallels in my life to Jonas and his excitement at discovering the edges of his world.

This week, right now, I am on the edge of Spring Break. In fact, in just under an hour I will take my suitcase and jump in friend Tiffany’s car and head off to the airport in Jordan, ready to zoom across waters and lands to my wonderfully familiar Elsewhere in the United States. But on the edge of this break, a break for which I am grateful, I look at the edges, a little frayed perhaps, of my journey here in Jordan.

It is a little like Jonas looking into the river and realizing that it carries with it everything that has come from an Elsewhere. A spring, perhaps, at the beginning, bubbling up from the earth; then a trickle from a glacier; a mountain stream entering farther along; and each tributary bringing with it the collected bits and pieces from the past, from the distant, from the countless Elsewheres: all of it moving, mingled, in the current. For me, the tributaries are memories, the playthings of historians.

Back to those bicycling days: at eleven years old I am not a particularly adventurous child, nor am I a rebellious one. But I have always been curious. I have a bicycle. Again and again—countless times without my parents’ knowledge—I ride my bicycle out of the comforts of my safe Westwood environs. I ride down streets on which I have never ridden because I am curious and I enter, riding up and down the Cincinnati hills, an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable, perhaps even unsafe Elsewhere … though I never feel it to be.

I love the feel of it, the vigor and the audacity of going somewhere new. But I never talk to anyone. I am not frightened of the people, just trying to make sense of their world.

It is the same curiosity that compels me to study in Salzburg, Austria in college. I remember choosing a study-abroad program wherein you lived with families rather than opting for a dormitory of American foreign exchange students. At first it is hard. I didn’t know much German. Dinner table conversations were limited. Going to church was strange since it was conducted in a language I did not speak fluently. But I remember attending this old Catholic church on the edge of town, when a woman stood in the balcony and sang words in English: “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people.”

I hadn’t thought of that service in years, and then the other day, that thought, fleeting, but profoundly assuring, entered the current of the river. We are all each other’s people now, I found myself thinking. Can you feel that this memory, too, is a stream that is now entering the river?

As we discussed the novel, I asked the teachers how our journey at KA is like or unlike the journey on which Jonas shakily embarks in his world. We discuss how comfortable, familiar and safe we think we want our journeys to be. In fact, we turn to the beginning of chapter 16, when Jonas gets angry at his difficult adjustments. “Jonas didn’t want the memories, didn’t want the honor, didn’t want the wisdom, didn’t want the pain.” He wanted his easy childhood back. He wanted to shield himself from Elsewhere. But like Jonas, I jumped on that bicycle and went exploring again. My instinct had been a child’s attempt to see for myself what lay beyond a metaphorical wall. That thinking becomes another tributary into the river of thought that brings me to Jordan.

I think about that, and it becomes a torrent that enters the flow of a river turbulent by now, and clogged with memories and thoughts and ideas that begin to mesh and intertwine. The river begins to seek a place to spill over. When Jonas meets The Giver for the first time, and tries to comprehend what lies before him, he says, in confusion, “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” I loved that line, and as history teachers we discussed how that is where most of our students, naturally, find themselves. They think there is only them. They think there is only now.

In the book it is clever how the reader is seduced. Lois Lowry, the writer, made Jonas’ world so familiar, comfortable, and safe. She got rid of all the things we fear and dislike: all the violence and prejudice and poverty and injustice—and all the choices.

One of the most exciting things about coming to this Elsewhere in Jordan is a profound resonance that we can’t live in a walled world, in an “only us, only now” world where we are all the same and feel safe. We would have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color and diversity would disappear and feelings for other humans would no longer be necessary. Choices would be obsolete. And besides, I had ridden my bike Elsewhere as a child, and liked it there.

One of the things that made this read meaningful for me was that I borrowed Hamzah’s copy of The Giver. If you are a faithful reader of the blog, you will remember this supremely kind, enthusiastic, bright young man who has been one of the best features of my experience in Jordan. I wanted to use his copy of the book in part to sneak a peek into what he had underlined when he read the book at the close of last year’s 9th grade history class.

What a delight to see what he wrote in the margins! Hamzah commented on plot points and how certain moments reminded him of shards of historical memory. He compared various moments to Soviet totalitarianism, Plato’s The Cave, and the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church. Hamzah also commented on the process of discovery through which Jonas changed in the book. One of the most delightful bits of marginalia came when The Giver transferred memories to Jonas and Lowry writes, “And this time I am not going to tell you the name of it because I want to test your receiving.” Hamzah wrote in the margin: “That’s what Mr. John wants us to do with critical thinking.”

The end of the book is vexing and ambiguous, like most journeys, obviously. Even if you have not read the book, it doesn’t give away much, but the ending can have many interpretations. Jonas is on a sled, and he starts down, to a final destination, “the place he always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that held their future and their past.” Last Friday as we discussed the book, and I had the nagging desire to get on that plane for Spring Break and go back to my family and friends, I felt I had a new thought about that Elsewhere—it was a circle. When they came to “Elsewhere” it was their old community, but they had accepted the memories and all the feelings that go along with it.

Tonight—Spring Break! And then in a couple of weeks I will leave that comfort zone and return to this Middle Eastern Elsewhere, making that circle, taking that risk.

The Giver is an unusual book to teach in a history class. Ahem, it really isn’t about history. There are certainly safer books. More comfortable books. More familiar books. Jonas took a trip beyond the realm of sameness. The man named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Of course, every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you take a risk. Each time any of us opens a book, we jump on that bicycle and go to an Elsewhere. The act gives us choices. It gives us freedom—magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.