Leaving

Marc Angelo. Schumann

When I was twenty, I dropped out of college and spent nine months backpacking in Eastern Canada--the stark and beautiful landscape stretching from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island known as the Maritimes region. For my Masters Thesis I seek to explore this year from a creative-critical perspective that draws principally on the literature of the English Romantic and American Transcendentalist writers. More specifically, I am interested in representations of two distinct modes of engagement with nature: perception and movement. The three main texts I will use are William Gilpin's "Observations and Lake District", particularly his description of the Picturesque in nature, Henry Thoreau's long essay "Walking," and Anke Gleber's recent book on urban movement, "The Art of Taking a Walk". In pursuing this discussion, I seek a natural confluence between story and commentary, idea and image, each deepening a coherent inquiry. The guiding motivation of this project is a human interest. I want to better understand both my own journey that year--one in which questions about my own place in the world and the kind of life most worthy of living weighed on my mind--and also that of several of the people I met along the way. I remember being struck, particularly during the first months of traveling, by how many people I met who had chosen this same transient, itinerant lifestyle-- like me, they were staying in hostels or campgrounds, working a few months here or there, picking up and moving when the mood struck. I was fascinated by this kind of subculture I hadn't known existed. They weren't really tourists, nor were they vagrants, hippies, drop-outs (my dad's word), or any other convenient label. They were just people, and had different reasons for the life choices they had made. I would like to tell their stories (at least a few of them), as well as my own. I am interested in exploring the community that developed among us. I've never written about this time before, and I want to better understand the impulses that moved me towards this nine-month experience.

Leaving

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