Sometime after that, Thomas Munk abandoned his academic career, as though untimely decisions were part of his personal agenda. He wrote to the chair announcing his resignation, a letter we’ve all read in the newspapers. Peter thought that his brother was attempting to unite culture and life, thought and experience. A whole generation was trying to do the same thing, abandoning conventional ways of life as a means to reach the truth.
After resigning from the university, Tom dedicated himself to traveling around the United States by car, and he’d send his brother a postcard now and then. He mailed them from different points along his way, usually through drugstores’ postal services. (Photo: A motel in the desert, and on the back, written in his nearsighted handwriting: “When I got to the hotel I had to spend thirty or thirty-five minutes removing insects from the windshield and the engine grille.”) He was going up Route 22 and randomly stopping in towns that lay outside the area of the highway. (Photo: A small town. “Around here everyone makes their living off beekeeping. All you can see are white boxes with screens and people with masks and yellow suits like astronauts.”) He even made it to Mexico and went around asking if he could buy a little ranch or a farm. (Photo: The Consul’s house in Cuernavaca. “Everyone here is talking about the massacre of students that happened three years ago in Tlatelolco.”) Then he crossed the border, heading north toward Canada, and took Highway 68 as far as the Great Lakes, asking around wherever he went about the kind of jobs there were and where he could get a remote piece of land. (Photo: An iguana in the middle of the road. “Someone stole my suitcase at a gas station. I have several bars of soap from the motel, a towel with tar stains, two red Clairefontaine notebooks, an AC electric razor, and a toothbrush.”) He let his brother know his most private reasoning in a letter he wrote while in a hotel in Oklahoma (a carbon copy of it is preserved in his files), in which it is possible to detect a certain slightly upset tone. “Night of November 3rd to 4th, on the way from Colorado, a hotel that has a typewriter, they gave me a warm welcome. I found a piece of land that’s very amenable to my purposes, close to the large reservoir in the next state over.” The photo showed a forest that covered the side of a mountain, extending through a valley and up to the bank of a large river.
2
The woods in Montana stretch for hundreds of miles among valleys, hills, and high mountains. An uninhabited area with harsh winters and long summers. Traditionally, it was the territory of fur traders and gold prospectors who often took to the hills and roamed for months like wild animals.
Thomas Munk arrived there on an uncertain date in the mid-seventies. One afternoon he showed up in the town of Jefferson, saying he was a surveyor and wanted to do some long-term research on the property. He seemed like a peaceable man who wanted to live a secluded life, like so many in this country.
“There are hundreds of desperate people who move away from the world and go back to a natural life,” according to Parker; “it’s a national epidemic, going to the frontier, seeking peace and empty pastures. My fellow citizens can be divided into the ones who furiously expand cities, producing cars and paving thousands of miles with asphalt, and the ones who go off to pasture and live in contact with nature. Between them will be the final battle of the war that started between the redskins of the mesa and the palefaces who came in from the cities.” Later there were hippie communes and then environmentalists who distanced themselves from civilization and lived in isolation. Those enraged children of nature believed their lives were mutilated and disfigured and their social experience was horrifying, and they were convinced that a new culture could be born in isolation, rejecting the urban multitudes.
First he built a wooden cabin, following the model of the one Thoreau had built in Walden, and he quickly adapted to life in solitude. He’d cut down a clearing in the woods and plowed a plot of land, fifty by fifty. He made a clay oven and an outhouse behind the cabin and dug a well to draw water with a hand pump. He built a woodshed and started gathering wood in autumn to make it through the winter.
During the day he’d go out to hunt and fish and look after his crops and his animals and keep the cave where he stored his provisions well-ventilated and dry. In the evening he’d return to his cabin and, once night fell, devote himself to studying and reading under the still light of a lantern. The only way to live in extreme isolation was to follow certain fixed habits. He divided his life into autonomous sequences, which obeyed the calm and stillness of changes in nature. The question wasn’t how to think about life but rather how to live in order to think.
During that time he began to write his Diary. He never set aside his work or his speculations on mathematics and logic, but his readings and writings extended into wider and wider registers. If you examined his library, it was impossible to imagine the direction in which he was carrying out his research (among his books, for example, he had Argentina, sociedad de masas by Torcuato Di Tella), nor indeed what relationship existed between his work and his militant actions.
The property and the Ford truck were in his brother’s name, so he didn’t pay taxes, or use electricity or gas,
