"Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe that I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
Is there anything to eat?"
Surely the good people at Washington College were expecting a different line of questioning when their candidate for Interim Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House drove down from the great metropolis from the north to make his case for why he should be hired for this one-year position.
The Lit House, after all, has been the seat for one of the premiere undergraduate writing programs in the country for 20 years; its walls speak of the luminaries who've passed through Chestertown to share their work with students, most—and here is the miracle, writers being, well, writers—keeping sober enough to remember names, read aloud without nodding off at the podium, and avoid the kind of embarrassing scene that lives on in mythology like the Decorated Poet who, at a sweaty party in his honor in Iowa City, cornered a young black student and murmured in his ear "You look just like Prince" even though he looked nothing, nothing, like Prince. Writers live in a country of their own imagining, after all, and few who wander over the frontier—or are kidnapped in their sleep—find this lawless region habitable for long.
But I digress from the subject at hand: a job interview and a question that, while minor on the surface, spoke to larger issues of being in the world that the same candidate would explore in the classroom after he was hired for the job and confront in the aisles of the Super Fresh, often late at night, while he searched, in vain, for something to eat. You see I am a New Yorker, and by this I mean that my sensibility has been permanently altered by the absurd availability of sheep's cheese from the hills of eastern Tuscany, sardines caught on single hooks by fourth-generation fishermen in a certain sleepy village in the Algarve, by bread baked to crisp-and-tender perfection in Tandoori ovens so blazing they would incinerate pottery and sushi so tender that it doesn't taste like the color of the sea—it is the color of the sea.
So, to return to that job interview from a year ago: knowing what you do about the candidate's relationship to food and its world of associations, can you blame him if, on his first trip to Chestertown, somewhere between the Walt Whitman rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike and the sandwich line at the Wawa in Middletown, DE, his heart began to sink?
"Is there anything to eat?" I asked the administrator who interviewed me first, and in the moments of uncertainty that followed ("What was that?" I read in his face. "Did he really just ask me if there was anything to eat here?") I realized that my question could be taken as an insult. Forget that: it was insulting. Something along the lines of, So what do you people eat down here anyway, grubs and crickets? Those big green ball-like things that fall from the trees? And yet, as the day of interviews wore on and I met more of the good people of Washington College, I couldn't help asking the same question and, each time I did (especially over lunch, while I was ... eating), I got the same puzzled look in response—"
What, he doesn't think we eat?—followed by inside information about the gas station/farmer's market, the best place to buy rockfish, the length and variegation of crab season.
Everyone was so helpful that my heart rose a little and I began to envision late summer meals of corn, fresh tomatoes and soft-shelled crab, maybe a little bowl of soybeans in sea-salt to go with the prosecco I would be sipping while my wife stretched out on the couch reading and I cooked. I was satisfied enough with this vision to accept the job offer when it came; still, I couldn't help but doubt the freshness of the vegetables at the Super Fresh and wonder, during those first few days in Chestertown, just what I'd gotten myself into. At the orientation for new faculty, while others asked about TIAA-CREF and faculty committees, I raised my hand and asked my question for the last time. The uncomfortable pause was longer—the senior faculty members sharing their wisdom with us glanced at each other as if to say, "Can you believe these freshmen?"—until one of them shrugged and said, "The supermarket works for me."
While my year on the Eastern Shore may not have transformed me to the marrow of my bones, like Goethe's sojourn in Italy did—note to the Trustees: a football stadium is nice, but how about a full-scale reproduction of Mount Vesuvius? Now that would be a recruiting tool—I can report, in all honesty, that the College's commitment to literature as a life-pursuit has inspired me to become a better writer and a better teacher, as have the students I've encountered in the classroom and the Lit House, who burn with an ambition to write well in a world that doesn't always value it, do good, thoughtful work in a world desperately in need of thought and goodness.
The Lit House is a treasure and I can only hope that it will be buffed and shined in the years to come and shown off to the big wide world for the treasure that it is. Washington College has been kind to me this year, and I have tried to return the favor when I could. Even if—sadly, yes, my fears were realized in the aisles of the Acme and the Super Fresh—there was nothing to eat.
Benjamin Anastas is the author of two novels, An Underachiever's Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance.
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