Wild at Heart

Westward Expansion Against the Soul

The way a man’s life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen, selling shoes at the mall, meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world – where the majority of American men live and die – requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul refuses to be harnessed; it knows noting of Day Timers and deadlines and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life. AS D.H Lawrence said, “I am not a mechanism.” A man needs to feel the rhythms of the earth, he needs to have in hand something real – the tiller of a boat, a set of reins, the roughness of rope, or simply a shovel. Can a man live all his days to keep his fingernails clean and trim? Is that what a boy dreams of?
     Society at large can’t make up its mind about men. Having spent the last thirty years redefining masculinity into something more sensitive, safe, manageable, and well, feminine, it now berates men for not being men. Boys will be boys, they sigh. As though of a man were to truly grow up he would forsake the wanderlust and settle down, be at home forever in Aunt Polly’s parlor. “Where are the real men?” is regular fare for talk shows and new books. You asked them to become women, I want to say.
Excerpted from “Wild at Heart”