Brady Armbruster Gets a Bad Case of Philosophy

Our high school spring break in Warren Harding High School in Cleff City in Cleff County, Kansas, square in the heart of wheat country and breadbasket to the world, was the same week that KU had their spring break.

Brady Armbruster’s brother was at KU majoring in philosophy, but was on a work-study program and couldn’t get away to Corpus Christi or Denver or Phoenix or any of the other ordinary spring break destinations but had to attend to his duties at the university library and cafeteria instead, so Brady headed east on I-70 to visit him there on the nearly empty college campus.

It was a week, Brady told me later, of deep reading among Bud Armbruster’s textbooks and library assignments, and long discussions into the night, and classic art film viewing at the Student Union, which is how Brady came down with a bad case of the angst.

He came driving back along that same highway about six days later in the other direction, but he was a different man, as he told you and told you.

“Does it seem as though I’m viewing life from the depth of some deep shadowed place, Denny?  A personal purgatory of my own making?  It wouldn’t surprise me if I did. Hollow eyes? The solemn stare of the man who has looked fate in the eyes?” He shook his head. “This is to be expected. I imagine you do find me quite a bit different.”

I hadn’t actually thought any of those things; he seemed the same Brady to me.

More than anything he looked excited, like someone who has found a new toy lying around that no one else had laid claim to yet, but it seemed important to Brady that I did, notice some big change that is, so I nodded my head gravely.

 “But Brady, what is it?”

“It’s angst, Denny,” he said solemnly, “it’s angst.”

I paused for a long moment. “Well, Brady, what’s angst?” When I first heard the word I had thought it was in the nature of a rash, or perhaps a joint ailment.

“Ah, there’s the question right there, isn’t it, Denny? Indeed, what is it? It’s a word all over Bud's philosophy books. He says you can hardly go to a lecture without tripping over it. But we didn’t get to the heart of it until midnight on Wednesday.”

He did what I believe is called ‘muse,’ nodding to himself the whole while as if recalling some terrible journey.

“What it is…what it is, is in the nature of the psychic anguish or the deep spiritual turmoil that results from deep contemplation of the way the world is, not as we would wish it to be. Anomie, that’s another word for it, a nameless, shapeless, shifting, sickness of the soul without any hope of relief,” he said cheerfully. “And it’s all mine.”

“Man, Brady, how bad do you have it?”

He patted my shoulder comfortingly. “Bad, Denny, I got it bad,” he said, I thought a little proudly. “It hits sensitive types the hardest.”

Andy Warner asked – we were all sitting around a fire at the lake, four boys and three girls – “I’m surprised that it hit you that fast, Brady. From what I read, they say it can take years to come on. Absolute years.” Andy was the smartest person in our class, and the only one who had actually heard the word before.

“Nope, came on me all of a sudden,” said Brady. “It just eats me up inside at night when I lay there and think about it.”

Well, Brady,” I exclaimed, ‘don’t lay there and think about it! Maybe it will go away! That’s what I would do.”

“Oh, my good Denny, my good, straightforward, very very non-complex Denny, if only it were that simple. No, once you got it, you got it nearly for the rest of your life. This is not an ordinary emotion that I’m talking about, the kind of simple direct type of feeling that my friend Denny might have. No, this is a much finer emotion than that. It’s what the poets might call ‘darkness visible.’  Though some people do pull out of it if they write a great novel or compose a wonderful symphony.”

“Maybe you should try that, Brady.”

“Yes,” said Mary Jane Matson, “maybe you should try that!” She sounded a little breathless.

“Others say,” said Brady, “that the love of a good woman can do the trick too.”

“I’m surprised to hear that,” said Andy, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a case of a man…”

“You leave him alone, Andrew Matthew Warner!’ said Mary Jane, whirling on him, her green eyes flashing, and Barb Jackson and Suzie Chambers chimed in too. “You just leave him alone! Can’t you see how this is weighing on him? Can’t you have a little compassion?”

“A lot of times,” said Brady modestly, “it can progress into full-blown existential despair and an abiding world-weariness…that’s what Bud says at least.”

“You poor thing!”

When he said such things he had a new kind of stare he would use, as though he was looking off into the middle distance, and didn’t much like what he saw but didn’t want to let on to the others how bad the bad news really was.

He gave that stare now. 

All the girls were full of sympathy for Brady, but most of the boys grumbled and didn’t seem prepared to give him much credit for this interesting condition. But I was with the girls, for he was a friend.

I will say this was pretty rare for Cleff City, where ailments ordinarily ran more towards farming accidents, viruses, and heart attacks. Angst seemed a little rich for our blood.

Most of our fathers were farmers, some of them full time, some of them more in the nature of a second income after putting in a full day at one of the assembly plants over in Hedge or Wycliff.

I asked my father about it that night. He asked me to describe the symptoms of this angst, and then he asked me if any of the girls were around when Brady unloaded his burden. I told him, yes, sir, and he only said, "you know, his father was the same way in high school.”

I can’t say that Brady ever seemed to get much worse, though he never seemed to get much better either.

Now and again he would edge in that direction, back towards ‘the healthy simplemindedness that I find so refreshing in my male classmates,’ as he described it, but whenever he did, he told me, life got a lot less interesting, and besides, it wasn’t unusual with angst to have a sudden relapse that could throw you all the way past angst and clear into existential despair.

That’s what you had to watch out for.

I had my eyes peeled for this existential despair, the next stage that was just around the corner and was even worse, but Brady seemed to keep it at bay with an extremely active social life, as he kept his soul busy or preoccupied you might say by going out with Mary Jane.

And Barb.

And Suzie.

It must have taken exactly that intense level of spiritual nurturing, because as I say, he at least didn’t get any worse.

I asked him whether it wasn’t complicated dating three girls at once, and he said “oh, come, Denny, we’re fifteen! We’re all adults here. I’m certain that the girls are able to cast aside the shackles of society’s expectations in order to fully explore and perhaps cure this disorder of the soul.”

“Well do they each know that you’re dating the others?”

Brady said that I had raised a very interesting question.

Well, it was a small town, Cleff City, and there was no keeping that kind of thing secret, and whereas at the beginning stages of the treatment the girls had a lot of sympathetic enthusiasm for the process, that was before they each knew about the others, and when two of them knew then the third wasn’t far behind, and I think you could say that the boys had never actually thrown themselves heart and soul into Brady Armbruster’s recovery and his novel methods of treatment, so you might say they were for a complete end to the treatment altogether.

The girls were spitting mad and the boys were egging them on, and soon enough Brady's existential despair gave way to more forthright and well-defined emotions, such as fright and personal terror.

These were farm girls who had grown up killing snakes and setting traps for coyotes. 

“Let Brady know,” Barb said to me, “that I have a relentless nature, as my upbringing led me to a strong distaste for varmints or infestations of any kind, whether they are in the grips of existential despair or not,” and the others said things in the same manner and with the same meaning.

When I told him of these conversations, Brady took it hard, and blamed the backward nature of Cleff, the soul-destroying environment that had so poisoned the girls’ minds, and our general lack of spiritual awareness and forward-thinkingness.

I didn’t like to say anything to Brady, for you could tell he felt these things strongly, and he had the air of someone who had been betrayed by fate, but just nodded my head when he told me that Cleff wasn’t ready for a soul as large as his, one that was so sensitive and so damaged both.

The school year was over and we were edging into summer about now, and it struck Brady – for now the fathers of the girls were involved too – that it would be a good time to hook up with a gang and follow the harvest, working the crop in the south Plains where it ripened first and then making his way back up to Cleff City just about the time that school was about to start up again, by which time people’s souls may have enlarged a little bit.

“Yes,” said my father, “Brady's dad was a big one for following the harvest too,” he said, folding his evening paper over and returning to his reading.

Brady and I agreed that this is just about what a tragic hero would do, or one of those Greek demi-gods when things were getting complicated, they would go out on a Hero Quest and search valiantly for the meaning of life.

“Yes, yes, that is what I’m doing,” said Brady, “I am on a Hero Quest, finding answers to life’s great riddles. I’m not running away at all, not at all!” he said breathlessly, slipping furtively out my bedroom window in the middle of the night carrying his belongings in a burlap sack, and I agreed with him that what he was really doing was finding his destiny.

That was the last we heard of angst; by the time Brady got home from the harvest at the end of summer a lot of the tension had worked itself out and besides Brady had a good collection of stories from his time on the road, while he was on his Hero’s Quest and all.

The boys didn’t seem particularly interested in the stories, but the girls ate them up, even Barb and Mary Jane and Suzie.

I don’t see much of Brady's stare into the middle distance any more, which tells me that in this one particular case, maybe the angst actually lifted from him wholesale and thankfully didn’t deepen into existential despair.

When I asked him about this, Brady allowed that he was much better in this department than he ever would have imagined he would be at this stage of the game, but that he intended to keep his angst ‘in his back pocket’ for when he went away to college himself. He seemed to think it would come in handy at that time.

As to the town itself, Cleff City, I can’t quite say if our soul-destroying environment and general backwardedness about things of an inward or spiritual or philosophical nature had improved any or if Brady had enlarged our souls to an extent worth mentioning.

Those things would be hard to measure I suppose. I always meant to ask Brady about that but somehow never got around to it. I will say that to me it seems mostly the same.