Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
6B

fear and self-loathing in santiago: 
an introduction

by Adam DePollo

By way of an introduction to this column, 

I’d like to say a few things about myself and 
my idea for the series that I hope might help 
you decide whether this piece is the one that 
finally proves you can no longer justify reading 
another word printed in The Michigan Daily, 
even for the low, low price of $Free.99.1

My name is Adam DePollo, and I’ve held 

several editorial and columnist positions dur-
ing my time at the Daily2 while writing on a 
wide range of topics3 in a healthy smattering of 
sections. But despite all of that work, my many 
character tics and neuroses, the critical stanc-
es I’ve tried to take in my writing, my relation-
ships with friends and family and the many 
hobbies I’ve been frantically cultivating over 
the years have yet to coagulate into anything 
I would feel comfortable calling a stable self-
concept. Or, in other words, I’m still eluded by 
the intangible somethingness toward which 
all of my efforts to date have vainly aspired: 
namely, Objective Knowledge of the Self and a 
concise answer to the Question of Questions, 
“What is the Meaning of Life?”

Fortunately,4 however, I’ve been afforded 

a rare opportunity this semester to leave my 
home, friends and family back in the callous 
Michigan tundra and spend the better part of 
six months in Santiago, Chile, exploring life 
on the planet’s much-discussed other hemi-
sphere.5 There, I will embark on one of the 

perennial undergraduate quests that our Uni-
versity6 describes as a “study abroad program,” 
but which I have already subconsciously desig-
nated “The Search for Self and Brief Glimpses 
of Universal Truth 2k16: Santiago Edition.” 
This column will, I hope, serve as an amusing, 
inspiring and at times heart-wrenching record 
of the Search, and, if we’re lucky, I might even 
come across a few instances of what the Wiki-
pedia article on novelist David Foster Wallace7 
describes as “earnest, unselfconscious experi-
ence and communication in a media-saturated 
society” — the lack of which might, for all I 
know,8 be what’s preventing me from figur-
ing it all out, landing my book deal and spend-
ing the rest of my life bumming around a villa 
somewhere as a much less confrontational 
version of David Duchovny’s character from 
“Californication.”9

Now, in feeling compelled to write this, I 

also assume that you (The Reader) want to 
read about how a guy like me goes about “find-
ing himself,” which I think means that, like 
me, you haven’t got it all figured out yet, either. 
But, let’s not fool ourselves, that’s kind of a 
weird way to go about figuring yourself out, 
don’t you think? Why not just go out and be 
yourself instead of reading about how some-
one else does it? What are we really getting out 
of stories like these? Why, as a culture, do we 
feel compelled to subject ourselves to this sort 

of syndicated navel-gazing?

I can only imagine there’s a very complex 

and multi-faceted reason for it, but, for my 
part, I’ll say that my fascination with stories 
about self-discovery stems from a combina-
tion of the fact that I’m a big fan of avant-garde 
story-writing (shouts outDaniil Kharms) and 
that stories of the self-discovery variety are 
one of the few underground literary genres 
still widely produced, even among non-liter-
ary-inclined people. Everyone has one10 and 
we come up with them, more often than not, in 
the privacy11 of our own heads, our skulls pro-
viding a calcium-rich cushion between these 
stories and the creativity-squashing influence 
of logic and fact-checking.

Because these stories are very rarely shared 

in any sort of public setting, strange things 
happen when people are asked to recount 
them out loud. Just ask any stranger in your 
nearest coffee shop how they “found them-
selves” (I have tried this) and the answer you’ll 
get12 will likely be a sprawling collection of 

sporadic anecdotes that sounds something like 
an absurdist combination of a presidential can-
didate-style stump speech and an emotional 
J.D. monologue from “Scrubs.”13 It’s somewhat 
off-putting at first, but that really is, I think, a 
pretty close approximation of what those sto-
ries we tell ourselves sound like when they’re 
bumping around in our brains.

The funny thing, of course, is that formally 

scatterbrained self-discovery stories of that 
sort work perfectly well to get you through 
the day and effectively do allow, who knows, 
maybe millions or even billions of people to get 
through their days without collapsing into a 
puddle of wrecked nerves. That fact alone — in 
my eyes, at least — pretty definitively demon-
strates that:

a. Any time you read a coherent “self-discov-

ery” narrative on a news site like this, you’re 
dealing with a literary construction, i.e. a fic-
tion, i.e. not objective reportage of any kind of 
“self” that exists in any tangible way.

and

1. The idea being that there is (in theory) some aspect of my character which would, despite 

the many differences that I’m sure exist between us, allow for the development of some kind 
of pathos or sense of kindred spirit between myself and you [the Reader], without whom this 
column would be little more than a sort of frantic travelogue written by an über-self-absorbed 
college senior who should probably be in therapy.a

1a. In practice it will be that, but with enough of you [The Readership, that is] racking up the 

page count, we might dare to call this column a Small Slice of the Millennial Experience, which 
is, as I’m sure you’re aware, another name for First Rate Journalism.

2. All of them (3+2 unofficial spots) in our Arts section, where I was given the ontologically 

distressing nickname “Father Arts.”

3. Including underground music in Detroit, sexism and commodity fetishism in Drake’s hit 

summer jam “Hotline Bling,” Grammy-winning jazz pianist Fred Hersch,student consumer 
behavior and its influence on local Ann Arbor businesses, the philosophical and political char-
acter of eating dinner alone, etc.

4. Fortunately for myself, I suppose — but who knows! Maybe for the rest of humanity, too.
5. I’m hoping that the answers to my many philosophical queries have been hiding down there 

in a spiritually resonant alleyway of some sort, or maybe under a vase in Chilean poet Pablo 
Neruda’s house, which I have every intention of visiting and whose restroom it is my most pro-
found wish to experience first-hand (since the toilet is, in my mind, the only real seat of genius).

6. Since journalism is a cold mistress who won’t pay for things like this and my parents are 

warm mistresses who can’t, the only reason I’m able to make this voyage is, naturally, with the 
assistance of UM President Mark Schlissel — or, rather, the University’s illustrious Financial 
Aid Department (Peace Be With It), which has, throughout my undergraduate career, had much 
greater confidence in my ability to pay back federal loans than any other entity on this earth or 
floating amid the ether of the great hereafter. I’m also assisted by our Uncle Sam in the form of an 
incredibly generous grant through the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program, 
which provides funding to allow “U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means 
to pursue academic studies or credit-bearing, career-oriented internships abroad." Such interna-
tional exchange, I’m told, “is intended to better prepare U.S. students to assume significant roles 
in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world.”

7. The first five chapters of whose magnum opus “Infinite Jest” I finished reading for the first 

time last week; and let me tell you, that is a guy who can sure write a lot of things. Wow. And 

his footnotes are really something — much more enthralling than your usual, run-of-the-mill 
marginalia. I, too, often have more thoughts than I could fit into a single sentence, but when he 
does it, it feels like you’re stepping into a whole new world with a much higher screen resolution. 
The closest thing I can compare it to is the feeling I get when I look at the Direct Optical guy for 
the first time after getting my new glasses prescriptions. All of the sudden he’s not only a Direct 
Optical Employee, but a Direct Optical Employee with a lot of pores and an oddly-shaped little 
scar next to his left ear, a deformity which I’m sure has some very interesting story behind it that 
I don’t feel we’re quite chummy enough to be able to ask about without seeming rude. Life is full 
of mysteries with the right corrective lenses.

8. He won a MacArthur Genius Grant, after all, so I’m sure his Objective Knowledge of the 

Self speaks for my human condition, too.

9. Keep on the lookout for a TV Notebook from myself re: the various problems with “Califor-

nication,” which are too numerous to count here. The most egregious, however, might be that 
the show ruins the perfectly pleasant idea of watching David Duchovny live out his days as a 
villa-based sardonic novelist/good-hearted hyper-macho literary enfant terrible by structuring 
itself around a prolonged, incredibly uncomfortable off-brand Nabokovian story arc wherein the 
forty-something writer gets his mojo back by way of sex with a 16-year-old girl who quickly 
turns into one of the show’s principal antagonists. It’s hideous. 

10. History and the arts are rife with examples of the types of horrific problems that pop up 

when we try to get around with (or just plain get around) faulty narratives about who we are 
and how we got to be where we’re at.a Much rarer are stories about people trying to get around 
with no such narrative whatsoever; can you name any off the top of your head?b There’s some 
sort of conceptual barrier there which I’m sure someone has written an essay about at one point 
or another.

10a. See: eye-gouging in “Oedipus Rex,” drunken arbitrary self-enthrallment in “The Tem-

pest,” the Holocaust vis-a-vis German post-WWI economic/legal sovereignty/national identity 
crises, death aboard a glacier in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” drunken hotel room stupors 
in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, drunken run-ins with nationalistic police officers in 
“Ulysses,” the murder of a perfectly innocent dog in “The Babadook,” etc.

10b. The closest thing I can imagine is a story that doesn’t exist. I’m thinking a remake of the 

movie “Memento” in which the anterograde amnesia-suffering protagonist never bothered to 
give himself any tattoos and simply doesn’t give a shit about the fact that he wakes up devoid of 

Illustration by Shane Achenbach

