Scott D. McLean, MD

On 8 January 2024 I retired from a career in medicine and am taking this next year to gather forces, or hoist myself by my own petards, before undertaking another crazy line of work. We are now winding up the first month of the gap year journey.

We have spent the last week of January 2024 at Crested Butte, Colorado, skiing downhill and Nordic, blue-sky days, improving on the moguls. There’s a lot of country out there, and we are grateful to be able to see it.

Last week in this Gap Year blog I spoke a small untruth. Sorry!

I said I was going to re-read Animal Farm by George Orwell, a classic first published in 1946, a touchstone of sociopolitical opinion that has been religiously offered to generations of adolescents and critics. Now, I did read it this week, but, truth be told, this was not a re-reading. I read it for the first time. OK, I know, it was just a small white lie, a peccadillo. Maybe I mis-remembered, since in 1974 some of the students in my sophomore English class probably wrote a book report on Animal Farm, and I dutifully graded their essays even though I never read the book. Why did I do this? Shrugging my shoulders here. Was it a ploy to avoid the ignominy of confessing that I had not read it before, a sure sign of being poorly read? Likely so. English majors are not allowed to be poorly read. Yet I am. Who would have challenged me? No one. I could have gotten away with it. Instead, I choose now to confess that I am an impostor. There, I’ve done the confession, now awaiting the expiation.

In the recent past, owning up to an untruth, however small, was normal and civil behavior. I wonder if the rumors are ineluctably true – that now those of you who go to any trouble to avoid the lie, big or small, are broadly considered fools. Hold fast, mes amis! Endorse the more honorable moral standard by embodying it. You may not be able to change the world, but you can change yourself. Speak honestly and truthfully, first to yourself, then to power.

Suddenly, I recall Hemingway’s obsession – “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

And of course those jeans do not make you look fat.

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Animal Farm was a bit of a letdown. A half a century ago I suspect it would have been much more inspiring and I would have signed on to support the political candidate that would not have chased Snowball through the hedge. What did happen to Snowball? I would hope something more than bacon, and no bipedal elopements. Orwell’s novel never seemed to depart from an atmosphere of strained artifice, though as I read it I was reluctantly eager to see what treachery would befall the sheep and horses. I learned some new vocabulary (“popholes”!!!) and found sufficient resonance with today’s insanities to conclude that our current despair is as justified as it is inevitable. Sigh.

The drive to New Mexico today snaked southward though canyons and arroyos, past bluffs and ridges and domes, with the great high ranges at distance, jaggedly grey. Their iridescently white peaks and high bowls defined an impossible horizon. Tonight we are in Taos.

This week I promise to read, but not necessarily finish, Land and People by Al Watson, Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser, and A Higher Call by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander.

Read Animal Farm. Remember Boxer. Speak up about the truth. Wear those jeans.

Scott