Review of a Pamphlet Some Old Guy on the Quad Gave Me
By Matt Romano
At 11:45 AM on a random Friday, an old man standing in front of MGC reached out to me with a pamphlet in his hand and murmured something unintelligible. I took it and smiled to be nice, assuming nobody else would be interested in his implicitly anti-Semetic rant about flat Earth or aliens. In reality, it was a small manuscript that could fit in the palm of my hand titled Traveler Pamphlet Ministry: Faith and Logic, Hitting the Wall.
As I did a preliminary flip through the pages, I couldn’t help but notice that the craftsmanship of his prose exceeded my expectations of inscrutable ramblings. “I can tell you from experience that except for the loved ones you leave behind, and a lingering sense of nostalgia, in the great anticipation of what’s ahead you will actually come to despise the material world and shake it off like an old shoe,” he writes on the first page.
Now, this thing is far from being the greatest piece of literature on Earth, and he quickly starts to tell an anecdote about General McCarthy in Korea before abrutly transitioning to a discussion of God in a section beginning with “Death is like sex.” Nonetheless, it crosses a bar of coherence that makes it possible to consider, or at least to appreciate. Of course, you’ll encounter glimpses of mania when reading it, but isn’t that the point of reading this genre of literature anyway?
"Having grown up in a funeral home, worked in a hospital, experienced love, war, drugs and book learning, I thought I was better prepared than most to face death but wasn't, I was a virgin,” he confesses, explaining his emotions towards death to provoke a larger discussion about theology. "It's a curious characteristic of humans and dogs, supposedly the more intelligent beasts - but not cats to believe in our immortality and act as if accidents only happen to others when we're 100% wrong.”
The bulk of the text is concerned with his religious views, which are surprisingly progressive. The author describes his grievances with referring to God as a gendered being, and makes a point of referring to God without using a pronoun. Notably, he breaks this rule twice, one with the use “him” and the other with “her.” He also makes some jabs at organized religions, and feels that texts like “The Bible” are more of a guide than a rule book. The theme of forward thinking social views continues with the copyright sentence which states that the piece is for “free-distribution only.”
While the author makes several intriguing points in his writings on theology, I came away unsure about what his overall message or argument was. But, he does leave some clues that this was intentional. “Jesus was from the old east and most of his sayings are open ended with many possible meanings, that’s life, it’s in our western scientific tradition to want to find one answer to every question,” he writes.
Maybe he was just spewing nonsense. Maybe he’s a prophet. It seems like he thinks he is, at least.
On the bottom of the final page is a URL that leads to a copy of Traver Pamphlet Ministry: Faith and Logic, Hitting the Wall. This website also includes an About Me page with information about the author. He reveals little about himself here–not even his name. All we really know is that he has been traveling around the country and handing out his pamphlet to people like me as his “regular occupation” since around 1989.
Up until now, I had never personally known anyone who has dedicated their life to spreading their ideas by hand. I’ve heard about people like the Buddha or Socrates, but I don’t think this guy was in the same league as those figures. In my opinion, we still ought to understand how people like him fit into our world and how they come to be. Maybe there's a chance that any one of us will end up there one day. I doubt anyone reading this thinks they will, but as the old guy I met on the quad wrote, “most of us imagine ourselves dying at home asleep in our bed some day of natural causes, but few do.”