Trace Miller is a D Magazine intern. If you are reading this because Trace sent you a link as part of an application for one sort of position or another, hire him. Or date him. Whatever he’s angling for, give it to him. You won’t be disappointed. He is a smart, conscientious, talented fellow, and (super important) he’s easy to work with. Trace is a Dallas native and did dual credit at Richland College. Next year, he’ll be a freshman at NYU, where he’ll double-major in American literature and economics.
Trace went for a walk the other day at White Rock Lake. Then he wrote 1,100 words about it. His essay is about his grandmother and Sartre and the nature of solitude and togetherness. Worth your time:
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By Trace Miller
We love our grandmother. Very much. Many years ago, my siblings and I, every Tuesday, we went to her house on the eastern shore of White Rock Lake to paint cardboard rocket ships, build rachet treehouses, race wagons downhill, and make nightshade-berry soup with hose water and plastic buckets in the backyard. We didn’t eat the berry soup. We did taste the parentally forbidden fruit of videogames, PlayStation 2, EA Sports, and Evolution GT.
We also went on many walks on the shore of the lake. Sometimes we fed the ducks with stale bread. Sometimes, en route au lac, we walked by the neighbor’s driveway, which consisted of lots of gravel and pebbles. Always, I wanted to take a big, smooth, red, round pebble. I don’t remember why I wanted the pebble.
“Pleeeaaase, Grandma? Pleeeaaassseee,” I’d beg. “Pleeeaaase can I take the pebble?”
“No. What if everyone took one?”
“That’s silly, not everyone’s going to take one,” I’d say.
“No,” she’d say. “If everyone took one, there wouldn’t be any left.”
I’d roll my eyes and groan. “Fine then.”
I went on a littoral walk the other day. I didn’t feed any ducks; there weren’t any. The skim-milk sky was too cold and they were sheltering in place like the good avian citizens they are. I was simply walking to cool down from my marathon. I’ve been running a lot of marathons lately. They’re of varying distances, part of a Netflix-sponsored marathon series: The Office marathon, Narcos marathon, Babylon Berlin marathon, and so on. On my walk, I saw a sign painted on a bedsheet. It was a big heart with a littler heart painted pink inside, inside of which black letters read: “WE R ONE.”
The whole “We’re in this together” bullshit is starting to get on my nerves. That’s precisely what we’re not.
Was the painter a boomer, thinking “R” is how the cool kids these days spell “are”? Was the painter a zoomer, thinking “R” is really how to spell “are”? Was the painter a BlackBerry- or other form of flip-phone-older-than-PlayStation 2-owner? Or was the painter reflecting on the symbolic oneness of the letter “R” replacing the pluralism of the word “are” in the phrase “We are one”? Like, a visual representation of the orthoepic phenomenon of om. You know, the symbolic Hindu syllable om that subsumes “a” (representing vaishnâvara, or “the state of waking”), “u” (representing taijasa, or “the state of dream”), and “m” (representing prâjña, or “the state of deep sleep”) into om, representing the fourth state, “the state of the self.” The state of peaceful, benign, pure oneness, this according to the Mândukya Upanishad. I guess we’ll never know what the painter was thinking. You decide.
There’s another thing. The sign reads, “WE R ONE.” No value judgement. No thumbs up or thumbs down. Just, for better or for worse, we’re one. The city become one flesh, like it or love it or leave it. And it is true: we are one. Not necessarily that we’re one in a Mândukya Upanishad sort of “pure oneness,” all that we see and all that we do not see is brahman and om is all there is sort of oneness. Maybe, who knows, but this is different. More along the lines of, like, your actions define you and humankind, and every human’s actions ever define them and you and humankind, so that everything is all mixed up and everything. No cigar, OK, but pretty damn close to pure oneness.
When you go walking or running at the lake and don’t social distance, you risk contracting coronavirus. When you then go to the grocery store just to get out of the house, you risk leaving it there. When another person goes to that grocery store to get foodstuffs and supplies, they, now, risk contracting the virus. When they return home, they risk passing it to their family. Insert exponential growth, and you’ve just created disaster. Insert high-risk individuals, and you’ve just created carnage. It’s all connected. It’s all one.
“Certainly, many believe that their actions involve no one but themselves, and were we to ask them, ‘But what if everyone acted that way?’ they would shrug their shoulders and reply, ‘But everyone does not act that way,’” writes Jean-Paul Sartre in Existentialism Is a Humanism. “In truth, however, one should always ask oneself, ‘What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?’ The only way to evade that disturbing thought is through some kind of bad faith.”
Sartre writes this in conjunction with his fundamental idea: that individuals are nothing other than what they make of themselves. That an individual defines their identity by their actions. That individuals define and identify themselves as they project themselves into the future. “Choosing to be this or that,” he writes, “is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose.” And to affirm value is to create an image of what humankind should be.
So, yeah, nobody can make you stay at home. That’s what Sartre calls “abandonment.” Regarding our current condition — quarantine — anything is essentially permissible. Social distance or don’t, you decide what you do. But when you break quarantine and don’t social distance, you define yourself as an asshole — and, by extension, you profess that all humans should be assholes. You act in bad faith, to yourself and your community. Because, sure, you just wanted to get fresh air or see your friends or enjoy life a little bit, but you risk removing that same joy and life from all others to whom you might just pass the virus. You’ve made your movie and it stars supreme selfishness.
So, yeah, realize we’re all interconnected and dependent on one another before disregard our elected officials and decide to do some quarantine smashing and social cuddling. Respect the fact that your grandmother is channeling Sartre when she tells you not to take the red pebble because what if everyone else did that? The grandmother who loves me so much that she sewed me a mask with trains on it before I went out into the world to do some reporting on food pantries. And stop spreading that bullshit about “We’re all in this together.” I’m lonely. Unless you’re a psychopath, you are, too. And there, my friend, is where we’re one.
