Walden on Wheels (Ken Ilgunas)

Pour ne pas se retrouver endetté à vie, Ken Ilgunas décide de dormir dans un van pendant ses semestres de graduate school à Duke University. C'est ce qu'il nous raconte dans Walden on Wheels. En fait, pas que... J'avais emprunté ce livre à la bibliothèque pour savoir comment il s'était débrouillé et tout et tout. Mais il n'aborde ce sujet que dans la troisième partie du livre. Dans la première, il nous explique comment il a remboursé la dette contractée pour ses quatre premières années d'université (de college, quoi). Dans la deuxième, il nous raconte les mois qu'il a passés en Alaska ; et dans la troisième donc, ce qu'il qualifie d'expérience (à la Thoreau, d'où le titre) dans le van garé sur un parking de Duke University.

Ken Ilgunas pense être le premier Américain à avoir découvert le moyen de ne pas rentrer dans le moule et l'existence même de ce moule. Sa naïveté fait sourire, agace un peu parfois. Mais il est jeune, on lui pardonne.

J'aime beaucoup la façon dont il descend subtilement Thoreau, comme pour excuser ce qu'il faut bien appeler, tout compte fait, son matérialisme. Même s'il a critiqué celui des autres pendant tout le livre, il doit se rendre compte qu'il n'est pas si différent. Après tout, il raconte son histoire dans un livre pour le vendre. Il est bien Américain. Et bien, quand Thoreau vivait seul dans sa cabane, c'est sa mère qui faisait sa lessive. Et toc !

Dans l'ensemble, j'ai bien aimé ce livre. Même si je ne pensais pas que le récit de ses séjours en Alaska occuperait la majeure partie, je l'ai trouvé plutôt dépaysant et carrément inquiétant. Mais je voulais en savoir plus sur sa vie d'étudiant et sur cette installation dans le van (je recommande particulièrement le passage où il découvre qu'il a un visiteur). Et même s'il passe beaucoup trop de temps à vouloir nous convaincre qu'il est différent, je recommande quand même. Ce n'est pas le livre de l'année toutefois.

Extraits : 

Le complot contre la jeunesse qui ne conteste pas

My debt wasn't as bad as other students' debts, but because I was soon going to enter the real world with an unmarketable degree (a B.A. in history and English) and because I had absolutely no idea how I was going to pay it off, the debt, to me, was more than a mere dollar amount. It was a life sentence. And soon enough, I'd be behind the bars of the great American debtors' prison, alongside the other 36 million Americans or so who'd similarly sentenced themselves to decades of student debt.

J'ai aimé cette critique de la work ethic.

Alaska, which I'd once imagined as a refuge from the nine-to-five working world, turned out to be just as bad.

It feels almost blasphemous to admit hating work. It's true that people often complain about working twelve-hour days, balancing two jobs, or suffering through double shifts, but it seems our complaints are often just thinly veiled boasts about how busy our lives are, as if having no time for leisure, for a good night's sleep, or to do the things we actually want to do is some virtuous sacrifice we should all strive to make.

I may not have admitted to anyone else-for fear of sounding entitled, or ungrateful, or whiny-but I hated word. I hated waking up early, hated taking orders, hated spending the great bulk of my time doing something for somebody else, hated how the hours would go by, hated how the days would melt into one another.

Pays de la solidarité et du christianisme

The shiny SUVs or giant, bus-sized RVs would ride on past, but the worse the rattletrap, the more likely it was to pull over for us. Maybe it wasn't strange at all. They lived lives with two feet planted in reality. Perhaps they didn't hesitate to pick us up because they knew what it was like to be cold and hungry and away from home. They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were-in the ways that mattered most-far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instince for empathy than the dowtrodden.

(...)

I couldn't wait to get away from the likes of Terry and Rusty and Harry. I couldn't wait to get away from their terrible stories of drugs and divorce, alcohol and additions. It seemed like everyone we rode with had some tragic past. I thought: Is this the real America? Have I just been quarantined in my happy little college and suburban bubble my whole life? And is this my real generation: poorly educated, overmedicated, abused, addicted, indebted?

Tout se vend au pays de l'oncle Sam. On vend de l'éducation comme on vendrait de la santé. Westwood College est un de ces établissements comme il y en a des centaines ici. Ils font de la pub à l'heure des soaps et autres talk shows pour ces gens désœuvrés qui se décideraient à faire quelque chose de leur vie. On peut profiter de tout ici. (Après l'enquête du Sénat, ils ont pris des mesures.)

Josh, meanwhile, who was still more than $50,000 in debt, continued to do "admissions advising" for Westwood College. On a normal day, he'd make 150 calls to prospective students who had made the grave mistake of typing their phone number into some online questionnaire, hoping to receive information about college options. Within days, that phone number would be sent out to a handful of for-profit colleges who admissions representatives-like Josh-would call every day for the next couple of weeks.

(...)

Westwood reps were taught about a variety of the school's programs, the career center, and the supposed value of the education, but a few crucial details were left out. The reps, for instance, knew little about the graduation rate or about how many graduates were getting jobs in their academic fiels. The reps were, however, given a thorough education in sales.

Ken découvre la société de consommation et que nous sommes tous manipulés.

It amazed me how thoughtlessly Josh and I had gone into debt. It amazed how thoughtlessly we had surrendered our autonomy. It wasn't just us, though. The whole nation was in debt. Going into debt had become as American as the forty-hour workweek, a stampede of Walmart warriors on Black Friday, or the hillocks of cheap plastic under Christmas trees. As a country, we marched from one unpaid-for purchase to the next in a question for fulfillment that fades long before the bill arrives.

Ken se pose des questions, pense qu'il est le premier et qu'il a trouvé un moyen original de se démarquer des autres.

Reading sixteenth-century French poetry, suffering through Kant, and studying the finer points of the Jay Treaty may seem to be, on first appearance, completely, utterly, irrefutably pointless, yet somehow in studying, discussing, and writing about these "pointless" subjects, the liberal arts have the capacity to turn on a certain part of the brain that would otherwise remain shut off-the part of our brain that makes us ask ourselves questions like: Who am I? What's worth fighting for? Who's lying to us? What's my purpose? What's the point of it all? Perhaps many students would rather not be irritated with these questions, yet being compelled to grapple with them, it seems, can make us far less likely to be among those who'll conform, remain complacent, or seeks jobs with morally ambiguous employers.