Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

Mine is the generation of Buzzfeed quizzes, the Cosmo Quiz, and the resurgent popularity of the Meyers Briggs and Enneagram personality tests. Millennials came of age on the pre-parental controls internet, and against the backdrop of 9/11, LimeWire, the Star Wars kid, and “Leave Britney alone.” Naïve and trusting, we clicked every link, played Flash games with religious fervor, and hoped sites like Quizilla and TheSpark would reveal ourselves to ourselves. The Internet gave us something no other generation had previously experienced: the unprecedented freedom to discover what an unprecedented technology could tell us about who we are.

If you’ve ever indulged in a personality quiz, whether it be “Which Sex and the City character are you?” or “What kind of elemental bender would you be?”, you’ve no doubt been hit with one of the most banal binaries of the quiz genre: “Beach or mountains?” Having grown up in Miami, Florida, I found it impossible not to scoff at the question. Beaches are painfully overrated, I thought. Even if I’d never seen a true mountain before—Mount Trashmore, a 225-foot high landfill in Broward County, did not, in fact, count—surely, mountains reign supreme over sun migraines, sand in every imaginable crevice, and swarms of noisy tourists.

I still stand by my answer. I couldn’t have predicted this as a child, but throughout my twenties, I’d come to live in several small towns with enviable views of different mountain ranges. Just before I turned thirty, I moved into a converted farmhouse nestled between Lake Champlain and the lush Green Mountains that Vermont is named after. Every morning, as I drive the thirteen miles between my home and office, I convene with the mountains.

But, how I see it, you can’t convene with a beach. At best, you congregate on it. Really, beaches ask so little of us. Mountains, however, instruct and delight, terrify and romance. They force us to consider our smallness, our tethers. If you stare at a mountain long enough, your most private ambitions will deliver themselves, front of mind. A mountain doesn’t care what your body looks like. You don’t need to prove yourself to it. A mountain won’t respect you more for scaling its tallest or most dangerous sibling, or carving your likeness onto one of their faces. A mountain already knows what you’re made of. It’s been staring back the whole time.

Today’s deceptively simple poem is as provoking as it is spare. With parallel syntax and capacious anticipation, we witness the unbridgeable silences that exist between man and beast, man and earth, and, most immediately, between each other.

Horse
by TR Brady

.
My lover waits for the horses all summer
.
I wait for the mountain all summer
.
The mountain waits for nothing
.
The horses my lover waits on are lovers or friends
live across the street
.
The mountain is real and loves no one
.
A warning swinging upon the horse’s neck
.
I swing between the parallel bars on the playground
across from the pasture across from the mountain
.
Distance was not the first disaster

"Horse" by TR Brady. Used by permission of the poet.