The Bridge

“Fuzzily, Paul was beginning to see that he had made an ass of himself in the eyes of those on both sides of the river.”

I read (or listened to on Audible) Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano recently, and I had to stop at the end of Chapter 10. Not because I was tired. Because I felt so seen, I had to grab my wife and replay it for her a few times.

The novel’s protagonist, Paul Proteus, is an engineer. He manages a vast automated works in a dystopian America where machines have replaced human labor. He is, by every measure, a success. He has the job, the house, the wife, the trajectory. He is being groomed for even greater things. And he is quietly suffocating.

One drunken night, Paul crosses the river to Homestead, the side of town where the displaced workers live, the people his machines have made obsolete. He listens to a preacher named Lasher talk about dignity and meaning. He gets swept up in something. He climbs on a table and shouts that everyone should meet him in the middle of the bridge, the managers and the workers, the two halves of a fractured society.

The table breaks. He passes out. No one follows him anywhere.

The next day, hungover and humiliated, he reflects:

Fuzzily, Paul was beginning to see that he had made an ass of himself in the eyes of those on both sides of the river. He remembered his cry of the night before: “We must meet in the middle of the bridge!” He decided that he would be about the only one interested in the expedition, the only one who didn’t feel strongly about which bank he was on. If his attempt to become the new Messiah had been successful, if the inhabitants of the north and south banks had met in the middle of the bridge with Paul between them, he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of what to do next. He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

And then this:

Paul did a complicated sum in his mind, his savings account plus his securities plus his house plus his cars, and wondered if he didn’t have enough to enable him simply to quit, to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody’s life. To live in a house by the side of a road…

In these current times, I do that calculation almost every day.

The Book

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Better Places. It was my version of climbing on the table. If I am honest, I may have been drunk with certainty, and my table broke too.

I had crossed some rivers in my life. Working class to executive. American to something half-Norwegian. One political conviction to another and back again. None of those crossings made me wise. Mostly, they left me uncertain where I belonged. I suspect this is a feeling most of us bridge crossers know well.

The book was an attempt to say: I’ve stood on different banks. I don’t think any of them have the whole picture. Maybe there’s something to see from the middle.

Some readers told me I was audacious, that I played psychologist a little, that I should have stuck more to my own personal experience and qualifications. But I wasn’t trying to teach the world. I was trying to find people, my people. Others standing in the middle, or willing to walk there. To sit with them. To see if we could see something together.

Many people found the book and found something in it. Some on the left thought me too accommodating. Some on the right found me too critical. Perhaps the Norwegians found me too American. Or Americans found me too European. I don’t say this as a complaint, these are reasonable responses to someone who refuses to stand firmly anywhere.

It’s quiet here on the bridge.

The Complicated Sum

So now I find myself, like Paul Proteus, doing the math.

Savings. Investments. Assets. The house. Is it enough? Enough to simply quit, to stop being, as Vonnegut puts it, “the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody’s life”? I bought a small fishing boat and thought, maybe that is my house on the side of the road.

It is not a one-time calculation. It is a daily intrusion. A recurring fantasy of escape. The number changes but the question does not.

Could I just stop?

Stop trying to build bridges no one asked for and spend more time fishing? Stop translating myself for audiences that have already sorted me into the wrong tribe. Stop writing books that leave me feeling, as I do now working on my second, exposed and uncertain whether anyone is listening.

Proteus dreamed of living “in a house by the side of a road.” The phrase comes from a poem by Sam Walter Foss, written in 1897, called “The House by the Side of the Road.” It was once one of the most beloved poems in America, stitched into samplers, framed on walls, recited at meetings:

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the place of their self-content;
There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze the paths
Where highways never ran—
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Let me live in a house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by—
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat
Nor hurl the cynic’s ban—
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I don’t think the writer wants to be a hermit, withdrawn from the world. But neither does he want to be a pioneer, blazing trails. He just wants to sit by the road and watch humanity pass, the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, and offer friendship without judgment. Without taking sides. Without being drafted into anyone’s war. Perhaps just go fishing.

That is what Proteus wants. That is what I want.

But why can’t I, and where is that house?

No Switzerland of the Soul

I thought Norway might be it.

For ten years, it was close. A society that had figured out how to balance individual freedom with collective responsibility. A place where the culture wars felt distant, where politics was boring in the best way, where you could live a quiet life and not be forced to declare yourself for one tribe or another. If I am honest, I grew bored with that house.

I fear that, like the managers and engineers of Vonnegut’s Player Piano, our techno-billionaire class — Musk, Thiel, and their ideological fellow travellers have declared a kind of war, and they are dragging everyone into it. Trump rattles sabers over Greenland and Denmark. The American chaos is becoming Europe’s chaos. The river I once crossed to escape is flooding its banks.

And here is what I did not expect: the people I thought might meet me on the bridge are not coming. They are staying on their banks and learning to rationalize what they would have condemned a year ago.

I have watched it happen. Good people, thoughtful people, people who would ordinarily recoil at the idea of threatening a NATO ally with military force, do not recoil. They explain. They contextualize. They find reasons why this time it is necessary, or strategic, or not as bad as it looks.

I should be careful here. I have done this too. I spent years on banks of my own, explaining away things that should have made me leave sooner. When you belong somewhere, when your friends are there and your identity is there, you find ways to unsee what would cost too much to see. I know exactly how it works because I have felt the warmth of belonging and the cold of walking away from it. I am not above this. I just happen to have already paid the price.

And it happens on every side. I have watched people on the left rationalize things that violated their stated principles, the right speech suppressed, the wrong people excluded, and the ends justifying the means they would never accept from their opponents. Belonging is warm. The bridge is cold. This is not a partisan observation. It is a human one.

But it means the middle is emptier than I thought it would be. Not because no one sees what I see, but because seeing it costs too much. The price of clarity is community, and most people, reasonably and understandably, will not pay it.

There is no neutral ground anymore. There is no house by the side of the road. The bridges are all burning, and every shore demands allegiance.

Proteus discovered this in 1952, or rather, Vonnegut imagined it for him. The dystopia of Player Piano has no outside. You are either a manager or a worker, either in the system or in the Reeks and Wrecks, the make-work corps for the displaced. There is no third option. The “complicated sum” that Proteus does in his head is a fantasy. There is no number large enough to buy your way out of a world that has no exit.

The Edge

There is another character in Player Piano who haunts me: Ed Finnerty.

Finnerty is Proteus’s best friend. He was an engineer too, brilliant, successful, rising fast. But he quit. He walked away from the system entirely. When we meet him, he is disheveled, drunk, careening through life without a plan.

At one point, Finnerty asks Paul if he thinks he is insane. Paul replies:

“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”

“Barely, barely.”

Finnerty does not want a psychiatrist to pull him back to the center. He wants to stay as close to the edge as he can without going over, because out on the edge you see things you cannot see from the center. Big things. Undreamed-of things.

I have been to some edges. Not as far as Finnerty. But I know what it is to feel the pull of the center weaken, to wonder if the middle is just a place you end up when you don’t have the courage to commit to a side or when you’ve used up your courage getting there.

That’s the thing about the bridge. On the edges, at least, you have company. You have your tribe, your certainties, your enemies clearly marked. On the bridge, you have the view, which shows you too much, and the quiet, the lonely stillness.

I used to think the view was worth the loneliness. Now I’m not sure. The people on the banks have something I don’t: solid ground. Belonging. The comfort of knowing where they stand. The warmth of friends who won’t ask them to choose between loyalty and sight.

I don’t know if my position is wisdom or just a failure to choose. Or maybe it’s just where you end up after you’ve left enough banks that no one trusts you to stay.

Why I Am Still Writing

So why write a second book?

Why keep standing on the bridge, talking into fog I can’t see through?

I do not have a good answer. Maybe because the alternative, silence, retreat, the edge feels like a kind of death. Not physical death, but the death of the self that still believes connection is possible. The self that read Better Places back to myself several times and thought: This is true. This matters. Someone will understand.

Maybe I write because the bridge is the only place I know how to stand, even if I’m not sure anymore whether that’s a choice or a limitation.

Vonnegut wrote that Proteus “knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.”

That is the trap. The system is not evil. It is reasonable. Every step made sense. The automation, the displacement, the sorting of humans into winners and losers, it all followed logically from what came before. And yet here we are, standing in the ruins of something that was never supposed to be ruins.

I cannot fix that. I do not have a pedagogy, program or platform. If everyone met me in the middle of the bridge, I would not know what to do next either. I guess I expect we should figure it out together.

But I can hold a lantern there. Or perhaps a campfire.

That is what this blog is. That is what Better Places was, or tried to be. That is what the next book will be, if I can finish it. Not a summons. Not a manifesto. Just a signal.

Someone is here. Someone else must be standing in the middle, doing the complicated sum, dreaming of a house by the side of a road that may no longer exist.

If so, you are not the only one.