At night I feel like a hermit in the middle of the city.
I think Tyler finds something poetic about that. The fact that we're secluded, alone for a mile in every direction, and yet surrounded by the seething mass of human life. Far from societal comforts, yet with the availability at our fingertips.
We're on the roof, surveying our domain, our urban jungle. The lights seem distant. Faraway headlights flicker like spastic fireflies, fluttering between monstrous buildings.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," a smoke filled voice intones from my right, where Tyler leans against the crumbling wall that's the only thing that's keeping him from tumbling to the ground. Reflected in his eyes is the burning cigarette in his hand, a golden tinge to bright blue. "To front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life." I swear he's a fucking mind reader.
"Who said that?" I ask. It had the feel of a quote.
He doesn't answer. Instead he flicks the dying butt of his cigarette into the night. The sudden flame from the lighter as he starts a new one ignites his face for a long second, before it's gone, leaving only a blue afterimage in my mind.
"Any philosopher," he says, and I think he's changing the subject. "Who would you fight?" Blue smoke encircles his head.
I know nothing about philosophy. "Socrates?"
He snorts. "Come on, you can't think of anyone better?"
I wrack my brain for any facts left from first semester of college and the class I took for humanities credit. "Nietzsche. He was one insane motherfucker."
He accepts this, the tip of his cigarette smolders as he inhales in a dim parody of the earlier brightness. It leaves no afterimage.
"You?" I ask, because he always has an answer.
"Henry David Thoreau."
And I realize he hadn't changed the subject at all.
He always had a plan.
"Fucking hypocrite," he mutters, tossing the second butt into the oasis of dark that surrounds us. The glowing tip leaves an arc as it flies away.
Thoreau rings a bell. Going back to the basics of life, lived in the woods, away from civilization and all its distractions. Sounds like Tyler's thing.
I almost say so, but he beats me to the punch.
Mind reader. I swear to our apathetic God.
"His ideas were brilliant, rejecting materialism and other faults of society by removing himself from it. But he only moved walking distance away from the town and gave up none of the comforts of the time. He gave no sacrifice, therefore he had no true enlightenment. He claims to have gained something from his life in the woods, but he lost nothing."
"We're walking distance from society, too," I remind him.
He smirks, his white teeth flashing in the darkness. His eyes have a triumphant glint. "But we're hitting bottom," he says. "Something Thoreau never dreamed of."
Author's Note: Okay, that was pointless. This actually sprouted because while we were discussing chapter two of Walden in class, I kept thinking how much this reminded me of Tyler's mentality, live life to its fullest and remove yourself from petty distractions of society. But, I think Tyler would have found it frustrating that to write Walden, Thoreau made no real sacrifice. He still had all the comforts in his self-imposed isolation. Yep. That's it. Thanks for reading, I own nothing/one… you know the drill.