On Studying Outdoors

Studying outdoors is an attempt to render the process of scholarship less frustrating, isolating, and, in a sense, pitiable. I feel more like a living man when I sit outdoors with my dog, book cradled in my lap. Cloistered in my cell, scratching away in the semi-darkness, I . . .

I just heard a series of bloodcurdling shrieks from across the street. I couldn't tell if they issued from the throat of a child or an adult. All afternoon I have listened to the sounds of my neighbor building something in his back yard. He hammers, he saws, he bores holes, he uses what sounds like a nail gun and all manner of other power tools. When I heard the shrieks, I engaged in the familiar internal struggle that comes with such ambiguity. Should I interfere? It sounded like someone in distress . . . and yet the sounds of building never abated, and after the cries died down the sounds continued uninterrupted.

The human relationship to sounds of distress is mysterious and complicated. I don't know if it's a product of our age. Would Whitman or Thoreau, some 150 years ago, have leaped the railing and dashed across the street, heedless of the embarrassment of error, and offered his help through the privacy fence to his unseen brother? I did not. In the past, I have, but usually only when there was a greater degree of certainty: either I knew the neighbor better or the cry for help was less ambiguous.

There needs to be a word for this.