It was all lies!

We had so many financial worries about blowing up our lives in the US and moving to a villa on a hillside in Tuscany! The big question looming over everything was how we would ever be able to afford to live this life. We thought very carefully about our budget, trying to imagine what we would need to spend money on and what we would have to abandon -- what pleasures we would just have to learn to live without. The propaganda everywhere in America, interwoven with every thought of European life, was that a life of beauty, of olive groves, art lessons, cobbled streets, views of the sea, tagliatelle ai funghi, red tile roofs and wine and roses blooming in November -- all of that would cost a pretty penny and leave us, sooner or later, destitute and regretting our profligate grasshopper ways. Better to work until you die -- it's the American way. But it was all lies!

Here is a very boring post about prices:

Our internet service costs almost exactly one-tenth of what it did in the US. Our cell phone bill is a little less than $15 a month (and we have the Deluxe Plan). Gas costs about $7 a gallon, but the tiny cars are incredibly fuel-efficient. The rent for our car (insurance included) is less than just the cost of just our car insurance back in Colorado. Trash and recycling pick-up is free. A bottle of wine costs about $2 -- or you can go super-expensive and spend $10. An entire basket filled with really fresh and delicious fruit and veg (spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peppers, grapes, plums, oranges) usually runs about $4. Yes -- only about $4 for all of it. We pay for loaves of bread at the bakery -- still warm from the oven -- with pocket change. We don't eat much meat, but a week's worth -- chicken, sausages, fish, prosciutto -- usually runs us about $10-15. Espresso is a dollar a cup. When we go down to the pub in our village for a glass of wine before dinner, we get a half-liter of the house wine and a bottle of fizzy water and are given free snacks -- sometimes so many that we are too full for dinner later. Total cost is $5. The rent on the rustic farm house (trusted gardener included) is less than we could have rented out our house for in Colorado Springs.

The whole idea that life must be a grim treadmill of unceasing labor just to stave off destitution is a lie that capitalism uses to scare us into submission. It's all lies.

And I think it is related that the big thing we have noticed is the lack of anger around here. That violence always bubbling under the surface in the US just doesn't exist here. I think it's because there is no feeling of dog-eat-dog in this world. The dogs eat homemade lasagna with fresh pasta and a glass of the house red just like everyone else.

 

In many ways, I became an academic in the first place because I love to read. Ironically, now that I have retired, I finally have time to read books for pleasure again. Even more ironically, the book that I am currently reading purely for pleasure (and enjoying enormously) is Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenny and Karl Marx, Love and Capital. I am currently up to the momentous year of 1848 and Gabriel's discussions of the horrors of unfettered capitalism, wealth inequality, and the economic transformations of industrialization are riveting. And enraging. That a society would be OK with people having to live like this!

Mudlarks, for example, were people (often children) who were pushed by poverty into trying to scrape the most meagre living by scouring the mud on the banks of the River Thames in London for whatever they could scavenge that they might be able to sell. There among the garbage, raw sewage, and corpses of dead dogs and cats (and sometimes humans), they might find a few pennies worth of something to sell and eke out another day of existence. 

Mind you, this was happening in sight of the towers and palaces of the rulers of an empire, of Queen Victoria herself. Those rulers had every reason to fear that Marx was right and that these oppressed and starving people would one day rise up in revolution. Justice would have demanded it.

I met a mudlark at our storage unit a couple of days ago. She cleans out houses that have been foreclosed and apartments where people have been evicted. Quite a lot of stuff is usually left behind and she scavenges what she can and stores it in her unit, hoping to be able to sell it somewhere. 

We talked about the recent spate of robberies at the facility. Someone has been cutting through the locking hardware on the individual units with bolt cutters and making off with the stuff inside.

"But who would want all this junk?" I said, looking at our stacks of used math books and boxes of baby pictures.

"Oh," she said, "People will take anything they can get these days."

Alas, in this version of 1848, we seem more likely to end up with fascism than any utopia.

Writing aobut the events of 1848, Marx said that everything in history happens twice -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Perhaps if we are lucky.

Yesterday was it -- the last day ever of my teaching career. The last reading assignment was two chapters from Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Façade and the very last line of reading that we discussed was Robert Venturi's quote about valuing the "the difficult unity of inclusion over the easy unity of exclusion" and how inclusion may indeed be more difficult, but it is also so much more beautiful.

The class is a group of really lovely students and they had made a card for me and we took a picture together and several of them spoke to me afterwards in really heartfelt ways and I, naturally, cried hard.

But now that part of my life is over. This morning, I am sitting home drinking coffee while they are beginning their final exam. I have grading still to do, of course, and the last scraps of bureaucracy. But the thing that has been one of the centers of my life for three decades -- talking with undergraduates about ideas and issues -- is over with now. I have no idea what my new reality will be.

It will certainly involve power tools, though. The contractor came in the afternoon to look at the hole in the basement wall created when Jonathan fell through the window-well two years ago. His comments on seeing it can be summarized mostly as, "Oh, my god." He is sending an estimate for the work today or tomorrow. The work itself probably won't be completed until June.

Jonathan and I shared a split of The Widow last night (in commemoration of the teaching, not the contractor) and ate some treats from our favorite bakery. And today, as I sit surrounded by boxes and empty walls, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it is time for class and yet somehow I am not in class.

 

 I am sitting in my office right now. The northern light from my big window is lovely and serene. There are no books on the shelves in here anymore. There are no pictures of the children around. Almost everything has been taken down from the corkboard so that there is nothing left except ghost shadows left from so many years of being faded by the sun. No one else is around and it is so quiet that I can hear the clock ticking. I am waiting for time to go to class.

The feeling of waiting is particularly pronounced in this moment, but it is there -- more or less -- all the time now. Our friend the electrician did not show yesterday to prepare us for our inspection exam. There was a scheduling snafu and now he is coming next week instead. We are waiting.

We have almost completely sorted through the books and clothes; we don't go to the storage unit every day anymore. The other things in the house can't go yet because we are still living here, still using them. I did get a wild notion last Tuesday (brought on by having attended the Chair's Meeting last Monday) that we could go ahead and store some of our less necessary furniture, so I took away a little table we had in the bathroom. Then I came back and wandered around forlornly for a while holding my hairbrush in my hand and realizing that I had nowhere to put it down.

I made a bunch of origami swans to put on my office shelves because the emptiness seemed so sad.

 

This past week was the first week of the last class that I will ever teach at Colorado College. On Monday, I cried twice -- once in class and once later in the day. I will admit that I am an easy crier, but it usually takes more than handing out a syllabus to turn on the sprinklers.

On Tuesday, I wrote on the white board with what I thought was a white board marker.

On Wednesday, it actually snowed underneath the covid-induced tent where class is held. Flakes blew in sideways while I was dividing the class into discussion groups for Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. All of the groups decided to go elsewhere to discuss. Shockingly.

On Thursday, nothing much happened. We had class prophylactically on Zoom, but the sun unexpectedly appeared, the temperature climbed, and -- against all weather predictions to the contrary -- it was the warmest day of the week. I finally abandoned all hope of ever being prepared for upcoming weather and decided to just utterly surrender myself to the caprices of the weather gods and the certainties of wool socks.

On Friday, I discovered that the thing I wrote on the white board on Tuesday is now permanently inscribed. Oops. I do wish that it had at least been something profound, but it was, alas, not.

In five days, I will begin teaching my last ever class at Colorado College. There will be a month of intense activity and then another month of desultory bureaucracy as I play at being the Acting Department Chair and then it will be over.

I have packed, sorted, donated, and otherwise disposed of everything that can reasonably be packed, sorted, donated, or otherwise disposed of given that we still need to live here a few more months. I have in some cases perhaps even gone too far and Jonathan wandered around the kitchen rather forlornly last night searching for a drinking glass, but mostly we are fine with our pared-down life.

I am not doing any writing just now -- feeling very burnt out after the big push to get my final scholarly book out. But also just suffused by the feeling that I am waiting -- waiting to begin, biding my time in a sort of stasis.

But I am very bad at doing nothing, I have discovered (although I have high hopes of developing that skill soon.) So yesterday, while waiting, I decided to learn how to make stop-motion films. Here is my very first effort:

My brother Joe says that the existence of Nick Park is proof that we are living in the best of all possible time lines, all other evidence to the contrary.

It spit snow most of the weekend. More is expected today.

I have been working with my senior thesis students who are coming to the end of this process. It is wonderful -- they are all working so hard, so thoughtfully, with such intensity and dedication. Or maybe with such fear and desperation. Hard to tell. It is (at least for me, who doesn't have to actually write a thesis myself) joyous.

My friend Neena asked me the other day how it feels to know that this is the end of something -- and, in a way, the end of someone. These are my last thesis students ever. I have already taught, for example, my last Social Theory class ever. Soon I will have, again for example, my last discussion of Resistance Through Rituals, a book that I first read almost 40 years ago and that I've been discussing constantly (in one way or another) ever since. I have been a college professor for over half of my life and I have loved it. I still love it. Except, you know, when I don't. I am not sitting in a faculty meeting right now, so perhaps my view at the moment is overly rosy.

When Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond in the fall of 1847, he wrote in his journal, "Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms."

In the meantime, Benjamin is making a film for his thesis and sent me a photo of his set for one series of shots. He has used a lot of my old sociology books as props. Even at a distance, even mostly turned away from me, I can identify every one of my dear old friends. "Look!" I want to say to ... someone, "It's Harrison White!"

It was lovely while it lasted.

 

I showed Jonathan my first post.

"You're so poetic!" he said.

I'm sure he meant it as a compliment.

Straight up: We have quit our jobs and decided to move to Italy. There is, almost inevitably, a certain amount of poetry involved in that, I guess.

Today is Jonathan's last official day of work. He is spending it in an all-day meeting. They are awarding grant money today -- discussing applications and budget constraints and impact likelihood. The meeting used to happen at offices in Denver. He would drive up and spend the day. A nice lunch was provided.

But because of the Covid pandemic, it is happening online. I can hear Jonathan's voice every now and then coming from the bedroom that the children used to share before they went off to college.

I will work through the end of May, the end of the academic year. Today I am home waiting for papers to come in from my Social Theory students. Then I will spend the weekend grading them. They are about the Postmodern Turn this week. 

My class was held in person for half of the past week and online for the other half because of a big Covid outbreak happening on campus. People are stressed. We never know from day to day how or where or when or what we will be doing. It is very discombobulating for everyone. I try to keep it all together, but after two years of this, things fall through the cracks. People fall through the cracks.

For a while I was teaching outside in a tent, but it is too cold for that in Colorado now. Snow is expected later today.

So, Italy.