Well…we all get old don’t we? We all wish for what we feel we have failed to do with our life at some point don’t we?
Junger’s recently released Freedom is a bit of that…and more a mishmash of random thoughts that don’t coalesce around anything truly meaningful or insightful.
I’ll give away the ending of the book because many of the review’s I’ve read of it have shied away from it and linking the reasons for the book’s development to begin with. Junger closes the book with a notation on how his is now in his early 50’s, childless, and in the middle of a divorce…so….yeah….
In short order after Junger’s east coast walk down a number of railroad lines (some 400 miles) that were somehow supposed to stand in for the “freedom” that the work is titled from, he would remarry and father two daughters. One can’t help but wonder at the eyerolling of his editors and publishers as they read this disjointed work and then began putting the pieces together as to why this was written. Clear to any reader Mr. Junger was proceeding through that most cliché of male expeiences—the mid-life crisis. The only thing missing here is the red sports car.
Now Junger wraps some pretty interesting historical anecdotes into this work—from the history of notable train wrecks, to Mongol hordes, to the extermination of an entire male ethnicity in Spain and so on…but none of it really has any connection to the supposed topic of the work. Sure he tries to weave a thread how these relate to “freedom” in a general sense but none of it carries much weight and feels more like a construct his editors forced on him—”Hey, you’ve given us 200 pages of your notes from your walk in the woods to turn into a book…can you please come up with some kind of theme that we can come up with a title for?”
Junger is definitely suffering in his later days…and to be honest I wouldn’t be shocked if the news came out someday soon that he has gone the way of Anthony Bourdain…a brilliant writer and assessor of certain parts of our culture but broken by life events—in Junger’s case the death of his friend Tim Hetherington and being a bystander to so much violence, death, and chaos. His “freedom” solution was evidently finding a new woman and having children, tying himself down to obligations that will actually move him farther away from the “freedom” he supposedly writes about. Now he definitely calls out modern life’s required balancing act between our reliance on society as a whole, that we must both contribute to as well as lean upon vs. homo sapien’s desire to be self reliant and independent of oversight and control. One just wonders if he has traded his own difficult, ugly, violent, distant, lonely life as a writer of modern global subjects with domestic demands that will also fail to fill what seems an every growing hole in his psyche.
But these are all ancillary issues to this work. The work is likely Junger’s weakest. Disjointed and confused are words you might associate with it. There is no narrative despite the attempt to wrap the discussion of freedom around his walk along the railroad and it leaves the reader empty and generally unenlightened. Hell, at certain times after he has rambled on about some random historical event you wonder just how on earth he is going to try and shoehorn the topic of “freedom” to it…but attempt to do so he does, in some inelegant and hackneyed manner. He has been and should be, better. Just not here.