The Wit’s Guide to Elsewhere

Or, fomo sapiens

So many mountaintops exactly like this one, but the others surely better in some way! But so far away!

Something’s happening somewhere, the Boss sang. Baby, he insisted, I just know that there is. But where? Obviously not here! Sorry, Asbury Park, N.J., but he asked to be delivered from nowhere. Ergo, elsewhere: The place where things are happening.

“Brought up in the provinces in the forties and fifties one learned early the valuable lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere.”
— Alan Bennett

The big city! That must be where stuff is! Bruce McCall wrote the archetypal get-me-outta-here memoir in Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada (and reissued with the subtitle Saved By The American Dream) detailing his longing to escape “the world’s only national culture nourished by self-effacement.” Once safely ensconced at The New Yorker, he could efface from afar, knowing that no number of cartoons about butter tarts would occasion his forced repatriation.

“A poet’s hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.”
— W.H. Auden

And that’s why elsewhere is so great: There, you can yammer on about the place you were before to people who might not know and perhaps even care. In his poem The Importance of Elsewhere, Philip Larkin revels in being a stranger in a strange land. When visiting Ireland, “strangeness made sense.” Back home in England, cultural differences were no excuse for not fitting in. “Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence,” he writes of the place he lived the rest of his life. This explains my theory on the endurance of cross-cultural marriages: Of course he’s nuts! He’s from Saskatchewan!

“When I travel, I’m always late and the orgy has moved elsewhere.”
— Mordecai Richler

But can we always blame the provinces? Saskatchewan, sure, but the others? The teenage longing for elsewhere doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with where you are. Hua Hsu’s Stay True describes a Bay Area adolescence, growing up in one of the most storied cities in the world but still hoping to escape. “You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next,” he writes of his time as an undergraduate at Berkeley. “Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there.”

“The bite of existence did not cut into one in Hollywood. Life elsewhere was real and slippery and struggled in the arms like a big fish dying in air.”
— Mae West

I started thinking about elsewhere thanks to Bob Beverley, a 71-year-old New York psychotherapist and paid Get Wit Quick subscriber who recently riffed on the term in his newsletter The Sharp Club. “Life is always elsewhere. This is the central motif of addiction, greed, lust, envy, comparing upwards, and rabid insecurity,” he wrote. “People who have self-respect or self-love seem to imbue things they own and people they love with greater significance. Maybe love is not a game of elsewhere.” Bob turns 72 exactly where he is on January 5. Happy birthday, Bob!

“When we do not find peace within ourselves, it is vain to seek for it elsewhere.”
— François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

When there’s no elsewhere, life becomes very grim. No one ever wants to be reminded of the pandemic lockdowns, but that was a time when there was nothing happening nowhere. To use the phrase memorably coined by Stephen Marche earlier this year, we were all stuck on The Grey Plateau. Sadly off in all directions, bupkis. I shuddered the other day when I remembered how excited my household was for, um, the streaming debut of Wonder Woman 1984.

“ I only want to interest the reader, he can go elsewhere for profit & instruction.”
— Mark Twain

This week, with: holidays in full swing; the sublime chocolate orange panettone available at Ba Noi; more movies in the theatres than there are people to see them; the best ramen I’ve ever had now being served at Machida Shoten; the annual book club Sumilicious dinner; a whole bunch of bookmarked Criterion films; the Christmas issue of The Economist soon on newsstands (newsstand? There may only be one left); the chance to rewatch Metropolitan, the wittiest Christmas movie; and our New Year’s party around the corner (message me for your invite), life is happening here. And also elsewhere! Maybe there’s even enough to go around?

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“Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
— H.L. Mencken

If you’re really upset at a business, you can announce that you’re taking your business elsewhere. Cut to me opening a shop called Elsewhere, happily separating bereft suckers from their hard-earned do-re-mi. And for next Thursday’s Christmas issue?

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Against Failboxes

Most problems can be solved with pine cones, as per this rendering by Tristan Zimmermann.

As someone who regularly uses the postal service to send things out to the lovely paid subscribers of this newsletter, I have thoughts! And with the brilliant designer Tristan Zimmermann, I commandeered a chunk of last Saturday’s Globe and Mail to explain how Canada Post ought to reimagine community mailboxes. We were not joking but also joking! More pine cones, obviously.

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Get Wit Quick No. 349 is happening right here, in your inbox, or in the Substack app, but I’ll be honest that it’s much better to read in your inbox. This text is called a colophon, as Josh Landy recently learned. More on his exploits in a forthcoming issue. I was so delighted to see the talk of snowmobile tourism in the comments to last week’s issue; feel free to keep the tips flowing below! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. By tapping the ❤️ below, you aren’t elsewhere.