“How did the idea of Ira’s shack maintain its hold so long? Well, it’s the earliest images – of independence and freedom, particularly – that do live obstinately on, despite the blessing and the bludgeoning of life’s fullness. And the idea of the shack, after all, isn’t Ira’s. It has a history. It was Rousseau’s. It was Thoreau’s. The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return – even if it happens not to be where you came from – to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, moult it all, all the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods – Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The “forest dweller”, the last stage of life’s way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.”
Philip Roth, I Married A Communist, 1998
