Solutions in Stoicism

Everything that happens to us happens for a reason, so a dominant way of seeing the world tells us. We might never be made clear on what that reason is in the moment. Sometimes, in hindsight, we learn to see a purpose and be grateful, which makes sense to our pattern-seeking brains. It may also provide some comfort to understand that whatever befalls us could be happening to better us, strengthen connections with others, or merely help us accept things in the moment, no matter how grim things seem.

Honestly, I struggle with this way of thinking. My inbuilt skepticism about worldviews that pretend secret knowledge, or that attribute things to some unknowable (and possibly malevolent) will, makes it hard for me to ascribe seemingly random occurrences to an all-knowing lesson-teaching entity. At the same time, I basically accept the tenets of Free Will, while understanding that modern neuroscience has essentially eliminated the idea that we consciously make decisions as we consider them. I wrestle with how both of these concepts can be true at the same time. Can my actions be part of some larger framework while the decisions I make are based on structures in the brain we barely understand? According to one school of thought, the answer is yes.

The idea comes from a school of Greek, and later Roman, philosophy called Stoicism. The Stoics were thinkers who held that the universe is ordered by a rational principle (logos) and that humans should use their reason to live in harmony with this order. They emphasized virtue—especially wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control—the disciplined management of emotions, and acceptance of what lies outside one’s control. In this sense, they were what we would call predeterminists, though not in the sense we sometimes apply to the theological offspring of Calvinism, where only the “pure and chosen few” are destined to get to heaven and “all the rest are damned.” Rather, the concept of predeterminism rests on the more sophisticated idea that the cosmos operates according to mechanisms we cannot possibly understand. Weather, famine, volcanoes, invasions, and scourges of locusts all occur without our input or action and therefore, because we have no control over them, whatever happens as a result of these trials will happen whether we accept them or not. This aligns more with the lyrics of the popular twentieth-century ballad that claims, “whatever will be, will be.”

It is important to note that this way of seeing the world is not fatalistic in the sense that there is nothing we can do to change events, so why bother to do anything? That way leads to madness. Instead, the Stoics supported the idea that there are things we can affect through our own actions. When the volcano erupts, we can help save our neighbors or provide food, shelter, and solace. In fact, this is exactly what they would have suggested is necessary as part of living within the world and in line with the concept of logos. The Stoics knew that our actions can have serious consequences for other people and the world. They understood that there were leaders, generals, and madmen responsible for invasions and war. They even acknowledged that the gods might allow storms, eruptions, famines, or pestilences for reasons we could never comprehend.

Although the concepts within Stoicism seem fairly arcane to us, the tenets of the philosophy are nevertheless applicable to the modern era. Later thinkers like Kant and Kierkegaard had the benefit of examining these Stoic assertions through the lens of their own time. As scientific and mathematical understanding grows, we too become more rational about the things that happen to us and our role in dealing with them, especially the moral and ethical questions such scenarios raise.

Even so, the Stoic way of thinking dealt with serious problems like the inevitability of age and death and, as Hamlet puts it in his soliloquy, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” paving the way for seeing the world—and our role in it—not as something we’re merely swept along by, but as something in which we have some control, if only in how we respond. When things happen to us, we can either blame the gods and curse our fortune, or we can take a breath, accept it as part of the story of our lives, and try to benefit from it in some way. They taught that the best way to do this was to see the universe as having inherent meaning and to recognize that our lives are merely part of a much larger story.

This is certainly a fascinating way of seeing the world. For instance, during the last ice storm—which thankfully wasn’t as bad as predicted in my part of the world—some people lost power, while others nearby suffered terrible damage to their homes from falling trees. “Why did this happen to me?” they might ask the sky. The Stoics would say, “These things happen,” and, emulating the children’s song, pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and start again. This is good thinking, and it is universally applicable, especially if we can remain philosophical and reason-bound as the vicissitudes of the world wash over us. If we are dedicated to the principles of Stoicism, they can serve us during any challenging time.

There is, of course, the idea that the Stoics were emotionless, like Vulcans, having given emotions over entirely to the rule of logic. This is a modern misunderstanding of Stoic thought. Rather than sublimating emotions, the Stoics understood that humans are emotional beings, that our emotions arise almost beyond our control, and that they are a natural part of the trials of our lives. If we imagine the loss of a loved one, the Stoic response would not be to ignore or hide from our feelings. Instead, it would be to allow ourselves those feelings while still trying to get on with our lives. This might be rendered as: “These things happen, and they make us feel like crap, but we get on with living, while allowing ourselves the dignity to feel how we feel.”

The Stoics didn’t live in a vacuum. They understood that life brings pain and joy, madness and anxiety. What they proposed was a way of seeing the chaos of the world that allowed us to keep suffering to a minimum (such as it is), while retaining our agency in the decisions that impact our lives and the lives of those we love.

One of the best modern examples of this form of predeterminist Stoicism is the Serenity Prayer. This ancient Stoic thought, rendered into modern Judeo-Christian language, goes: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” My own favorite version is less influenced by religious terms and references to God. It goes: “May I find the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to act when I can change things for the better, and the wisdom to know that there is a difference.” This is sometimes referred to as living life on life’s terms, which, seen from the perspective of Stoicism, is exactly what that group of ancient thinkers was trying to imagine. The benefits of trying—there is no perfection or enlightenment promised in Stoic thought—to see the world this way are noticeable, if one has the ability to at least try.

The predeterminism part of Stoicism still rankles. For me, thinking that my life is merely a part in an epic play conceived by an entity that cares little for me (as little for me as I for it) is distasteful. And yet, if I stop to think about it in rational terms, our lives are predetermined in some fundamental ways. Each of us is mortal, doomed to “shuffle off this mortal coil” at some point, sooner or later. We cannot know when, but we can accept that this is true and, in solidarity with that idea, try to act accordingly in the moment.

A dear friend of mine has a somewhat saccharine saying that is nevertheless an excellent way of seeing things: yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today is a gift—that’s why we call it the present. I admit there is a fortune-cookie quality to this particular aphorism, yet despite that, it really is a Stoic sentiment at heart. When we combine it with the spirit of the Serenity Prayer and the unavoidable reality of our own mortality, what we wind up with isn’t a concoction of pop psychobabble or New Age fluff, but a keen set of principles for seeing ourselves both as agents in our own affairs—acting to the best of our ability, remembering our mortality, understanding that life happens, and recognizing that we can choose how to deal with it while honoring our emotional lives and trying to find healing and understanding.

This somewhat knotted way of thinking is actually the foundational perspective of Stoicism and, as the great emperor Marcus Aurelius put it in his Meditations, “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.” It may seem like cold comfort indeed to think that our lives are preordained, that our choices have no benefit, that we are leaves floating on the surface of a sometimes raging river. With thought and reflection, though, we might find that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we can act for the benefit of others, and that we can accept the challenges of our lives more thoughtfully if we remember that we’re only here for a short time. That realization makes me want to remember how fortunate I have been.

As my dear friend might put it, this ought to give me an attitude of gratitude. From that starting point, I can face anything and recover from the ills of life’s misfortunes. That, if nothing else, is a fine solution to life’s challenges, grounded in Stoic predeterminism.

Salamander Syndrome

Somewhere, I learned that salamanders, tiny amphibious creatures that live in ponds and streams, have such a small brain that, if you remove one from their environs, they will starve and die. This is why it can be challenging to capture a salamander and bring it home as a pet. The change is too jarring for their tiny systems to manage. Incidentally, the only such creature I might want for a pet would be the big, two-foot-long hellbender salamander that dwells in the Smoky Mountains. 

I'm not an expert in salamandridae like Bertie’s friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle, but I do feel a strong pang of kindred sentiment when I think of these little fellows getting picked up by thoughtless children and jammed into a pocket and suddenly losing their tiny minds. Like the hapless amphibians, I cannot be moved too far from my daily schedule, or I go completely off track. It’s not a choice. I have had some really odd and unpleasant experiences when I stray too far from anything resembling routine for too long.

Most of the time, I am pretty okay. The occasional holiday or vacation, or week off to putter in the yard, doesn't disrupt my balance. What does mess me up, strangely enough, is what just happened this past week: I worked on Saturday until 1. After that, the rest of the day felt like a Friday. The problem began the next day. All day Sunday felt like a Saturday. So much so that when Monday rolled around, it felt like Sunday. This is one of the things that we all experience, but I was so knocked off kilter that I began to wonder if I had Salamander Syndrome for real. If a calamity takes us away from the normal sense of days of the week, I may wind up jabbering in a corner somewhere. 

I should add here that I have always thought days have a feeling or sense of themselves. Mondays feel like Mondays, and Thursdays have their own feel. I’m not sure if everyone experiences things that way or not, but it is real for me. There are aspects about each day that give it its own flavor. The point is, when you interrupt the normal flow of things, then some days get to feeling like others, and everything gets mishmashed, and I get lost. If there was a desperate need to know the day and I was in the grasp of my Salamander Syndrome, like this past weekend, then I would be of no use. You know, the hero of the event comes to me and asks what day it is, and everything depends on me getting the answer right, and I respond, “Tuesday,” and it is a Monday, well, you see how bad that might be for everyone.

I'm not aware of any Sunday of a long weekend in recent memory that has felt more like its weekly predecessor. All day, we did Saturday things. We even stayed up a little longer than we usually do, just like a Saturday. At some point, I acknowledged that it was a long weekend and that the next day was a Monday, but I was badly disrupted. Not fully in the corner weeping, but getting close, for sure.

To solidify the illusion, on Monday morning, Micki made biscuits, and I made eggs. We sat in the dining room and had our breakfast, and then named the chores we were going to work on. I called Pop Bare, and she edited a video. All Sunday things. All of this was diverted so far from a normal Monday that it was unsettling. I use the term advisedly. It wasn’t just weird. It was deeply, eerily unsettling.

It might be apparent by now, if you are a regular reader, that I like cosmic and existential horror. The idea that aspects of reality can slip or shift and leave us teetering on the brink of madness is appealing because it deals less with monsters and more with perception and experience. Why shouldn't a day's sense of itself switching or changing leave someone (like me) on the edge of my own sanity? The fact that a day can change like this and make itself seem like a different day isn't just maddening, it is sinister. Also, who decided that days ought to have a feeling? Why can’t days just be days? Why do they have to have names, and worse, feelings?

I imagine that, for those tribes that have been, until recently, undiscovered in the deeps of the Amazon, each day was the same as any other. They all only feel like regular days. Some days one goes fishing or hunting, other days one cleans out the hut. There is no particular day when any one thing is done, but any day will do. Their gods (if they even have them in the sense we think they do) do not require that one day be set aside for worship. Again, any day (or, perhaps, every day) will do. They don't have weekends or school nights. That would imply that they have the same system of work-a-day structures as we do. Every day for them is just “today”. It seems infinitely refreshingly relaxing to have days just be that day, and not assign them names, meanings, feelings.

Once, several years ago, a small person at the library came up to the desk where I was working and asked me what my favorite day was. In a moment of uncharacteristic dash and wit, I answered, “Why, today, my young friend. Today is my favorite day.” And, if this was true, it was likely because it was a Thursday. Gods help me, I have always had an affinity for Thursday. At least during adulthood. When I was a kid, there's no telling, but then, during childhood, the only time days or months matter is in the classroom, and back then, I had whole summers of untended, unlabeled time to wander through with little regard for the day or the passing time. What a glorious period of time it is in our young lives when we have no idea what day it is and are yet unscathed by the bliss of that ignorance. It makes me envy my granddaughters.

Thursdays aside, I'm always happy to wake up, and since every day that I do has a name already agreed upon by social convention and universal compact, then I suppose any day is as good as the next. It is less the name than the events that occur on any given day that give each its tone, and we usually don't remember the day anyway, but only what occurred on it.

Perhaps it was Lewis Carroll who suggested that, rather than having the same set of days resetting after the seventh day (why seven and not nine, which feels more rounded and broader), what if we just name every day something new? Instead of trying to force a name at dawn, we could wait until the end of that day to name it based on its best or worst features. This idea, which has the lovely incidental perk of there never again being a meeting next Tuesday, had some merit. It would effectively eliminate the need for Tuesdays. Then, we could just say “Be seeing you,” and be done with it. Date night could be every night. Tax day could be forever delayed. No more Mondays dressed as Sundays or Sundays in garb as Saturdays. 

Better yet, we could simply make every day Thursday. How wonderful would that be? Well, I acknowledge that there would be some issues, namely those surrounding our seemingly ingrained need to schedule things in advance, and questions about logic. If it is raining, it must be Thursda would certainly pose some interesting logical dilemmas.

And so, in a sense, there are some benefits, for me at least, in being so damned devoted to a robust and clear schedule. I, for one, would not long thrive in a world without day names. I'd be like one of Carroll's characters wandering about, mumbling inanities, which, now that I think about it, is probably coming at some point in the next few decades, anyway. For now, though, even if it means a meeting next Tuesday, I’m better, happier, less wobbly, if we have day names and I can avoid Salamander Syndrome.

Temp Position

Winter in the South—at least according to my family still living in Pennsylvania—isn’t all that different from winter “up north,” or at least my part of it. Pop Bare often tells me that whatever the weather is doing here in North Carolina, it’s doing something similar there. That doesn’t surprise me. Our winters have been a little harsher than usual lately, probably because we’re just as vulnerable to those polar vortices that swoop down and leave everything in a Frigidaire state for a week or two, from Canada to Georgia.

I sometimes pine for the winters I remember from childhood, along with the cooler summers, though this may be false remembrance. Summers were hot and humid in Pennsylvania, too—just not as humid as six hundred miles farther south—and winters were colder, but not dramatically so. What really changes isn’t the number on the thermometer as much as the quality of the cold or heat. That difference can feel negligible in the long view, but to people unaccustomed to either extreme, it can be genuinely uncomfortable. I occasionally imagine a place with Yankee summers and North Carolina winters, though I suspect such a place would still require a wardrobe update, if it existed at all.

The Scandinavians have a saying: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.” I’m sure it sounds prettier rendered in Swedish or Finnish, but I would very much like these fair-haired northern Europeans to come hang out in North Carolina for a few weeks in late July and see how well their ideology holds. Nils and Sven can come on down, and we’ll peel them off the sidewalk with a human-sized spatula. I’m happy to return the favor and visit Norway in February, though I have serious doubts that anything in my closet would keep me from becoming a Dave-cicle. Fair’s fair.

Despite this, I’ve always wanted to visit the Nordic countries. A fair chunk of my heritage comes from there, and there’s something magnetic about that part of the world. By all accounts, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are lovely—clean cities, kind people, functional governments. Most visitors, however, sensibly avoid going in winter. That season is dark, bitterly cold, and relentlessly snowy. Staying inside becomes less a preference than a necessity. Even with my “Yankee” upbringing, I’m not prepared for that kind of cold. If my Nordic kin couldn’t handle a North Carolina summer, I’m not going to feel bad about expiring from hypothermia in Oslo.

I think about the weather the way farm people do—because what else is there to think about when you spend your days riding the back of a mule, caught between earth and heaven, dependent on whatever the sky decides to do? When people like that meet, they talk about the weather. I do it too. Every time I talk to Pop Bare, he asks what it’s doing here, and we spend a solid ten minutes discussing local conditions. It’s just what we do.

What I’m usually thinking about in all of this is relief. When I watch shows set in California or Montana, I imagine summers that are actually tolerable. I once even entertained the idea of living on the mercilessly flat Canadian plains—nothing but wind and grass. A truly stupid television show set there made me think August might be pretty clement: mid-70s, no humidity, a steady breeze to keep the Canadian super-sucker skeeters at bay. I could seriously dig that. Even if it crept into the low 90s, the lack of humidity would make it survivable. Eventually the sun would go down, and the idea of needing a hoodie or windbreaker to watch a summer concert past dusk feels like a dream.

Instead, if we decide to see a band here in the summer, I’ve usually changed my shirt three times just getting ready. By the time we arrive, lugging chairs and a cooler, I’m already soaked. Gods help us if it’s one of those North Carolina nights when the breeze has taken vacation and every leaf in the Piedmont hangs limp. It puts me in mind of the cooler summer evenings I remember from Pennsylvania.

A few years ago, while visiting my brother, I got sunburned helping him with chores during the day. That night, lying in the grass watching Independence Day fireworks, I was chilled to the bone. That’s the kind of summer I remember fondly. If someone asked me whether it was hot or cold enough when I lived in Pennsylvania, I’d probably laugh and say I was just fine. Here, it’s never cold enough and always too hot, and I suspect it always will be.

Here’s the thing, though: I love North Carolina. If the summers were truly unbearable, I’d have figured out a way back north by now. Fall and spring more than make up for summer, and truth be told, I’ve even come to like our summers—at least in theory. I should qualify that: I like summertime; I don’t always like being out in it. I am usually miserable when it’s hot. That’s not changing. One thing it guarantees is that I won’t move any farther south.

Once, while visiting family in Louisiana in August, I got so impossibly hot that I couldn’t cool down until we were halfway back to North Carolina. The swamp-laden, alligator-and–water-moccasin heat left me faint and ill for days. On another trip, in December, we went to see the Panthers play the Saints in New Orleans. On December 29th, it was 84 degrees and sunny. No, thank you.

Traveling has taught me how relative all of this is. In Houston one Thanksgiving, it was seventy degrees and balmy, and I walked downtown in shorts and a T-shirt while locals bundled up like a nor’easter was coming. Years later, in upstate New York in October, men parking cars in thirty-degree weather wore shorts and light jackets while I shivered, underdressed and underprepared. Everyone calibrates differently.

A couple of weeks ago, Micki and I went to Hanging Rock State Park for a short hike along the Indian Creek trail. It was cold and blustery, stuck in the thirties, though the sun was bright. We bundled up, descended to the waterfalls, and climbed back out, and by the time we neared the ranger station I was peeling off layers to cool down. We followed Micki’s father’s hiking rule: dress in peelable layers so you don’t sweat yourself into danger. It felt good to get back in the car and turn on the heat, but we were never in any real trouble.

Two weeks later, we stood outside a downtown theater waiting to see a cover band, and it was seventy-two degrees. In January. The next day, while taking down Christmas lights, I had to keep going inside to add layers as the temperature dropped. By bedtime, it was twenty-nine degrees with wind gusts near thirty miles an hour. Twenty-four hours earlier, it might as well have been May. That’s North Carolina. If you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes.

I’d rather not be so hot in the summer, and I’d rather not worry about frostbite in the winter. All things considered, I think we’re in a pretty good position. The nice thing about traveling is that you get to come back home, where—even if I’m going to complain about the discomfort—I at least know what to expect.

"The House, Crooked to the Eye"

 Author’s Note:

The house referred to in this essay is a real place. You can go there. Whether or not any artifact of my upbringing there exists outside of my own memory, or that of my brother, I have no way of knowing. The title of this essay comes, with respect, from Shirley Jackson. She, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and many other “Gothic” authors have contributed to my blurred rememberings of that place, but though it reads like fiction, the story is true.

From October 1982 to October 1997, I lived there, just off North Market Street in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania. Across the road was an ancient cemetery on a high hill overlooking part of the town, where some of us played hide-and-seek or dared one another to visit under the full moon. No children came down the winding lane past the gooseberry bushes to trick-or-treat at our door because of how unsettlingly frightening it looked. Parents of school friends invited me to their houses rather than sending their kids to mine. Several attempted birthday parties never happened because classmates—or their parents—wanted nothing to do with the property or the house.

It was a historical marvel, but even the Revolutionary-era inscriptions left by Hessian mercenaries weren’t enough to make the townspeople overlook the site’s unsettling atmosphere.

Family visited, yes, but mainly stayed outside. We always went elsewhere for holidays. Big family dinners were only ever held with the immediate members of our clan. There were never parties or gatherings there. Even my stepfather’s mother, who lived in her own house on the property, rarely ever came down the hill to the house. We would sooner scrunch into her tiny but cozy domicile than gather around the table in the big house.

All of this to say that, whatever skepticism you may feel as you read about the house I grew up in, please know that it nevertheless made people feel unsettled and uncomfortable. It was a feeling that the residents got used to, but not one that could be ignored.

The house we lived in when I was a boy was built in 1757. It was a huge cubic block of gray limestone and ancient timbers that previous owners had tried and failed to hammer into modernity. My stepfather, the most recent in a line of owners who attempted to square the house with the era, insisted that it had a great deal of character, which was a nice way of saying that it was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, always murky inside, and without the conveniences other houses had. “The house, crooked to the eye,” as Shirley Jackson said, looked like a house from the outside, but once in its dim recesses, perception and mood changed. My lifelong fascination with all things dark and Gothic originates from my hope—in fact, my need—to understand and confront that unsettling childhood house.

After she and my father divorced, my mother remarried a few years later and packed up her sons and our belongings and moved us there. I was just four. Whatever I felt then, as we drove down that lane and the house loomed up before me, is gone now, like pain from a long-healed wound; I know I must have had feelings about it, but I can’t get back to them. I do remember that my new stepbrothers took no pity on me and used the house’s weird angles, inky corners, steep and treacherous stairs, and odd, twisting hallways to scare me at every opportunity.

We had no real bedrooms. Instead, my stepfather constructed walls made with boards, joined to fit together seamlessly, and screwed into the ceiling beams. This formed a barrier between the space my brother and I shared and my mom and stepdad’s room. Rather than a door, a curtain of stiff fabric covered a rectangular opening. Likewise, the only other door into my room was a curtain hanging between the chimney structure at the head of my bed and an inside wall. Despite the house’s shadows, draped fabric walls, and oddly constructed “rooms,” I accepted it as any child would, simply because it was where we lived.

As children, we cover each part of our childhood dwellings with tiny fingerprints, examining everything from the floor level up. At age four, I was learning, recording, building connections, and strengthening neurons. Rather than carpeted floors and ceiling fans and closets, as my peers were experiencing, my childlike imagination was fed by the old house. I learned early to count steps as I went up and came down because the number sometimes changed. I learned to feel my way through the gloomy maze of hallways and rooms, as the angles of the corners were sometimes hairpin and sometimes wide, but never exactly ninety degrees. The hallway would curve left when it should have gone straight, dumping me into gloom that smelled of nowhere I’d been before. Upstairs especially, one had to take special care, as the spaces seemed to expand and contract. A midnight trip to the kitchen might be quick and soundless, but returning, I might find that I had wandered unwittingly into another room I had never been in before.

Lying on my bed, staring at the beams carved with Hessian bayonets, I sometimes felt as if the bed was affixed to the wall and I was suspended on its surface, other times as if I was on the ceiling looking down. The stone facades cast shadows that looked like unkind faces, especially when the shadows grew long. After inviting historians and anthropologists to investigate certain anomalies in the house’s attic structure, those college men said that one of the original families had a child with special needs that they kept up there. After they departed with their notes, we all listened in quiet horror as steamer trunks and footlockers and other items were agonizingly put back to their original places, but not by any of us. The sense of being watched, that the house was breathing, that the shadows grew more tenebrous on brighter days, were all part of the house’s overpowering nature.

Even today, if I think hard enough, I can still hear the creaking floors and other strange sounds and feel the light trying to penetrate the gloom. It is a part of me, the way any childhood home is for one’s formative years, but this house came with a powerful and brooding personality all its own.

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When I was twelve, my mother was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia. By the time I turned fourteen, she and my stepfather had embarked on an ongoing quest for treatment. His mother lived on the property in a small log house that he restored and updated, but I stayed in the old house. From then on, until I was halfway through high school, I was alone there.

Like Hareton Earnshaw, the sad, uneducated, nearly feral character in Wuthering Heights, with whom I have so much in common that to read that book today is to harrow up old feelings of neglect and frustrated individuality, I was left to my own devices in the black heart of that old house. It was during these prolonged absences, though, that the poisonous atmosphere of my mother’s deep Evangelical beliefs broke and parted like fog in a wind, and portions of the world could be experienced without her sometimes zealous parental oversight. In the absence of family activity and the bustle of daily life, the house grew more potent. It wrapped me in its ample darkness until I became a creature of gloom within its bending, shifting, shadowy walls.

My mother and stepfather would come back from time to time and instigate a little routine in my life. Then there were quarrels about grades, homework, chores, the messiness of my room, and the house’s power would recede a bit, as if frightened by the noise of more than one inhabitant. Then they would be gone again, seeking treatment, and I’d be alone. Then the house would close in again.

Once, midway through high school, they came home and stayed for several months together after a particularly trying experimental treatment had fallen far short of its promised efficacy. My mother felt the somber nature of the house in her spirit by then, I think, and it nearly broke her. She succumbed to deep bouts of depression. Desperate to help her, my stepfather took her for electric shock treatments, which made her childlike and vague, sometimes vacant. After that, the house seemed to feed on our misery and forced us into the lightless corners of our own dread. I remember feeling stifled, suffocated, unable to get a deep breath, and running full bore out of the house on frigid winter nights just to feel the clean, cold air on my skin.

Not long after, learning from her doctors that my mother’s health situation was dire, they departed again, this time seeking more serious intervention. Soon after they drove up the lane away from the house, I entered and felt myself swallowed again by the shadows within.

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Inside, I dwelt in an imaginary realm where I was a normal kid from a normal family, with doting parents that actually cared about my emotional well-being, nice clothes, a dependable used car, like my best friend Lee and so many of my other friends had, and prospects for the future. By late adolescence, I had not yet arrived at the point in my life where neglect during my upbringing in that house would show through in a young man with severe social anxiety, deep feelings of impenetrable loneliness, and an inability to feel anything about myself except unworthiness to be anywhere but alone in the house. Every daydream, every fantasy, every heartfelt wish, every desire to be accepted and loved was perpetually contaminated by the darkness within those walls, which only deepened my feelings of being left alone, unwanted, and forgotten. I lost myself in a realm of unending imagination that I couldn’t shake. The house offered me false dreams and then consumed the despair born from my recognition of the deception.

It was part prison, part sanctuary, part companion, and part jailor, and it was full of centuries of bad feelings of all who ever dwelled there. It haunted me with those hopeless memories and left its mark on my spirit. It tied the worst loss of my young life to itself so that the only memories I have of my mother stem mainly from the house. When the anniversary of her birth or death rolls around, it brings my mind swiveling back to those twilit, meandering halls and mysterious, shadow-strewn rooms. I joke that I am only truly at ease in a dark room or in the long nights of the dark half of the year. It is because, in some way, the gloom of the house now resides inside me with those memories, as much a part of me as my bones.

These impressions are rather stark, and yet it seems as though I can only remember from the vantage point of a third-person witness, not my own experiences. I was young when we moved to Schaefferstown, so there is a chance that the upheaval from that period of transition burned out some of the memories that average kids have. Even so, these feelings are so deeply rooted in my formative years that, to me, they are incontestable. There are some vague impressions from my mother’s second wedding, but those are mainly based on old photos. I very clearly remember starting school, my teachers, and visits to Pop Bare and my grandmothers.

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As hard as it can be to acknowledge the murky memories of the house, I know that my time there was real. The darkness of the place dwelt in me for years after I was kicked out. The tendrils of it clung to me even back then. When I periodically visited my grandmothers or my father on every other weekend, the experience of being in modern homes felt cloying, suffocating, and overwhelming. Their homes were warm in the winter and cool in the summer and were not inhabited by the unseen chittering and jibbering of restless things in the attic or the arched-ceilinged basement. There were no echoes of furniture moving or floorboards creaking when I was alone in the house. The silence felt jarring. It was too quiet, and it felt painfully empty. Those other houses had the same number of steps going up or coming down. Their upstairs hallways and corridors had an unchanging number of rooms secured by wooden doors and painted walls adorned with family pictures. They felt inviting, safe, and homey.

Over the years since I left the Schaefferstown house for the last time, I have routinely remarked that that part of my life was cobbled together from the best—or worst—bits of Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James, with Shirley Jackson and Lovecraft trickled in for good measure. With the house as the centerpiece of my childhood, it is a wonder that I got out with my sanity intact. I got out of it, but the house still lives on in my head and heart. I sometimes still dream that I am there, wandering the meandering, dreary halls, unable to find a way out. I have never been back, except to drive Micki past it once early in our relationship, maybe as proof, or to snoop via Google Earth in moments of bleak nostalgia. It belongs to new owners now, but I hear that they live in other housing on the property and that the house stands empty again, perhaps awaiting new inhabitants to devour.

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In October of 1997, just shy of the first anniversary of my mother’s death, my stepfather and brother had a brutal falling out. I came home from school to be invited to a meeting with him in which he made it clear that we would be parting ways. He asked me to call Pop Bare and have him come get me and my things by the end of that week. He made it clear that anything we couldn’t take, he would destroy. He was as good as his word. No photos exist of our time there with the house in the background. There are no pictures from inside, either, which is yet another oddity that I sometimes cannot confront squarely. After her death, and along with her other possessions that I couldn’t take, my stepfather burned all evidence of us ever having lived there. Except for my brother’s corroboration and shared experiences, especially early on, I sometimes wonder if there is any tangible proof except from inside my head and heart.

As Pop Bare pulled up the long sloping driveway, his pickup truck filled to brimming with all the things I could fit into it, I felt an uncertainty and dread that would become a close friend over the next few years. As we moved away, I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my core that ripped the poorly healed scabs off the wounds of my loss. In that moment, I had a sense, too agonizing to understand fully, that the dark roots of my childhood house were being yanked free and that the house was sinking back into the abyss of long years and unhappy memories and that I was floating up out of the sunless depths to an uncertain and emotionally painful future. Maybe it was a premonition, at the very horizon of which I saw hope and peace for myself. Maybe it was merely the final, permanent removal of the house’s influence.

Whenever I think of that old place, though, that’s how I see it: hulking, lightless, like some monstrous creature lurking at the bottom of a sullen lake, black and imposing in the dim depths of memory; aware and, to further reference Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, not sane.

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I eventually found hope in my life away from that house. Its shadows have long been chased away by the bright, warming sunlight of unconditional love and acceptance from my family. It took me years, but I have since come to the understanding that the boy in that house deserved—but also desperately needed—love and acceptance, whether or not he was an inconvenient child. I used to feel dismal resentment at being born a walking daydream, with insatiable curiosity and a love of books and music, because those things made me different. The house found a sad boy—lonely, bullied by his stepbrothers and classmates, ignored and neglected by his parents, a casualty of divorce and remarriage—and settled on me and devoured my melancholy. That boy needed a home where love ruled, with parents who protected and encouraged his individuality. Instead, he got a haunted wreck of a house, writhen with its own centuries-old loneliness and the burdens of generations of sad, helpless mortality. That boy and that house became unlikely companions, and it is a wonder he survived the friendship.

Today my heart has healed, and I am no longer poisoned by those feelings of neglect and sadness. And yet, we are products of our environment growing up, and my environment inside that house was a mixture of the dark tales of Emily Brontë and Shirley Jackson and others, and it left me with a desire for dark rooms and a love of Gothic tales. All of which is because they remind me of my childhood home.

That place is as much a part of me as any other home I have dwelled in. I will never want to fully excise it from my history. The house, my life there, and the people who mattered then and still matter today will be with me at the last hour. I got out of there and missed being poisoned by its insanity. For this, I owe my stepfather a great deal. Burdened by the inescapable grief of my mother’s death, he brutally cut me free from my childhood home and all that it had become to me. I ached from the suddenness and trauma of his deed for years. That pain fed my alcoholism and brutal social anxiety. I resented him for taking it away from me and casting me into an uncertain future.

With the benefit of therapy and eventual recovery, I now realize that, as twisted and brutal as it was to be severed and pushed away from my childhood home, had he not done so, I might still be there myself, like the house—haunted, twisted, shrouded in solitary, feral memories long devoid of hope or light—if I had survived at all. So, odd as it sounds, I am grateful. Wrung with insane grief, the man did something that may have saved my life. It’s taken a long time, but mingled with my pain at the memory, I also now feel a sort of unexpected gratitude.

Unlike anyone else’s upbringing I know of outside Gothic fiction, I was raised in a house filled with misty half-rememberings and strange, shifting spaces, bad feelings, miserable fantasies, and a soul-devouring sentience. I realize that I’m not like other people. The term weird has been used liberally throughout my life to describe my eccentricities, perhaps justifiably so. Rather than feel upset by the epithet, I understand and accept it. When I have haltingly explained to Micki or our boys that during the most important period of development—when other kids were gathering to watch family movies or play board games—I was wandering through an old house that was and still is a dark and malignant place, mostly left to myself to explore the unsettling labyrinth within those clammy, stifling stone walls.

I might be weird, but knowing what I came through, if that’s all that’s wrong with me, then I’m incredibly lucky, and I know that very well. Reworking the old adage, I have often reflected that, you can take the boy out of the house, but can you take the house out of the boy? I'm living proof you can.