Stories
The First Leap:
from Neosho to New York
David Rounds
* * *
The transition from Neosho to New York, from the small town to the great city, was the first great leap forward of my life.
When I look back on my formative years in New York where I attended Columbia College, I realize that I was not a very nice person. I was brilliant, creative, ambitious, egotistical and self-centered. Now, being older, when I meet young people like this, I admire them, but try to stay out of their way to avoid being hurt.
Perhaps that can help explain some of my psychological depressions and anxieties that led me to try suicide and seek psychoanalysis. Probably I was not "bien dans ma peau" as the French put it so well (not "good in my skin"). It was the first of many breakdowns that I would have when stresses became too much for me to bear.
I was not at all involved in issues of social justice at that time. In fact, the radical students at one time were set to take over the Columbia College student government, and I joined with other anarchists to vote to abolish student government altogether in order to stop their plans.
In the summers I went out to the Rocky Mountains in Idaho and climbed up onto Rice Peak where I was paid as a fire lookout and able to work on my writing, painting, etc. While I felt "sick" in New York, lonely among the millions of people there, I felt alive and healthy in the mountains, living in nature and free from neurotic relations with other people.
At the end of this period, before going off to graduate school at Yale, I traveled through Europe with my girlfriend Susan (see photo at left) and got my first taste of the Old World. We had a wonderful time together on this voyage of discovery, meeting up in Hamburg where she had been studying and going by train from place to place on the way to Rome, including an especially beautiful time in Venice. After she flew home from Rome, I went on to France by hitchhiking, including a visit to the cave of Lascaux in the last month before it was permanently closed. In Paris I met up with David Rounds who had come there (unsuccessfully) to meet James Baldwin, and we became good friends, writing our novels together the next year. I look from time to time at the scrapbooks that I put together from that wonderful European voyage.
It was during these years that I began to consider myself an intellectual, not simply absorbing the wisdom that I encountered at the university, but also beginning to compose new things, such as page poems, a sonnet sequence, the novel Master of the House and a psychoanalytic analysis of the personality of Jesus which was ultimately published at Columbia. I wrote everything down at that time in spiral notebooks, dreams, poems and fragments of writing, notes for novels, notes from college courses, and have kept them to this day.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme