4 minute read
The Last American Man—Meghan Johnson
aegis 2007
Gilbert, Elizabeth. The Last American Man. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. 288 pp.
Meghan Johnson
In The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert invites readers into the life of Eustace Conway, a man whose mission in life is to return to nature. Not only is this a goal for himself, but Eustace also desires all people to make an effort to connect with nature and live a more simple lifestyle. Gilbert’s illustration of Eustace Conway became a National Book Awards finalist and was also a New York Times Notable Book. Gilbert explains the timeline of Eustace’s life: where he grew up, the differing styles in which his mother and father raised him, and the steps he took to achieve his current lifestyle. It didn’t take long for Eustace to realize that in order to live a simple life, he needed to preserve his own piece of wilderness. Growing up, he would familiarize himself with nature in the woods surrounding his home in North Carolina, when those woodlands were developed to provide more and more homes for people requiring more and more conveniences and distance from nature, he knew he needed to own his own land and save it from development and urban sprawl. This desire led him to acquire more than 50,000 acres in North Carolina which he calls Turtle Island. Turtle Island serves as more than just Eustace’s home and a nature preserve; he wanted it to be “the setting of a colossal utopian experiment in which he would try to do nothing less than change and save America.”(95) He has had groups of children and adults visit Turtle Island to experience nature and he even runs an apprenticeship program through the compound. People apply to “shadow” Eustace and learn to live off the land and be more nature-savvy individuals. Unfortunately, no one has been able to complete the entire program and usually ends up leaving due to the heavy work load or because they just cannot deal with Eustace’s impersonal and demanding personality. Eustace has such great plans and goals for himself and society but unfortunately he lacks the interpersonal communication skills to accomplish all that he has set out to do. Eustace’s main argument against modern society is that we are too absorbed in the conveniences and not in the basics such as nature and life itself. He differentiates his lifestyle from that of the typical modern American in that he lives
in nature, where everything is connected, circular…The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don’t live inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in the real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they’ve stepped outside the natural circle of life. (18)
comforts have detached humans from nature and the land. During the 18 th and 19 th centuries, boys going west and becoming pioneers served as their transition into manhood, but in 1890, new came from the “Census Department that the American frontier was suddenly and officially closed.” (7) When there was no longer a Western Frontier of which to conquer, being a pioneer was no longer a literal concept and transitioned into a popular metaphor. Gilbert points out that many phrases are reminiscent of our nation’s Western Frontier days: describing an entrepreneur as a “pioneer” or “cowboy,” or referring to people beginning something new as “staking their claim.” Society has replaced nature with business and economics and kept the same mentality. (123) From his experiences with children during visits to Turtle Island or school presentations, Eustace has become concerned with the mental and emotional state of America’s children. He feels that “children are now less than human” because they are so focused on material things and conformity.(137) To fight this trend, he has gone to extremes to get children to really experience nature and return to the mentality of children before the “closing of the frontier,” one example being actually having children lay on their backs in trenches on the forest floor and leaving only their faces exposed, so that they become one with the surroundings. It’s fitting that Gilbert gives Eustace Conway the title of the “Last American Man” because he seems to be the only known person actively pursuing the lifestyle upon which so many Americans believe our nation was founded upon. Gilbert claims that “he is our mythical inner self, made flesh.”(126) He is able to live in a way that most of us respect and are amazed by, but at the same time think “I could never do that,” or maybe it’s that we don’t want to, or are afraid to. It’s this thought that Eustace wants to eradicate. He believes that through mindfulness, “showing up for one’s own life,” we can return to the “mythical” idea of American pioneer lifestyle and mindset. His advice? “Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness.”(258) Eustace’s philosophy really gets the reader to reflect on their own lifestyle and just how far removed from nature and the “basics” they really are. Perhaps his expectations of society are a little extreme and unrealistic. Not everyone will quit their job and leave the city to live in the woods in a teepee. That would be Eustace’s ideal. However, re-familiarizing the youth of America with nature, promoting less conformity within society, saying “no” to unnecessary luxuries, and eliminating the “I can’t” mentality would do wonders to save the mythical “American Man” from extinction.
