Exemptions - Reflections on an Era
Exemptions has been a solipsistic amusement of mine for over 40 years, something I started as a potential short story in 1973 and returned to every time I wasn’t working on something else. I've written and rewritten it quite a few times. There is no counting the drafts, and only a few pre-electronic or typewriter-era pages have survived. Archives for 80s and early-90s versions would be on hard-shell floppies.
Its original title was Fission. In the late 80s I changed its title to Astral Bodies. Finally, after a brief temptation to call it Student Exemptions, the story finally became Exemptions. Considering the numerous drafts of the book, its final version probably ought to be hundreds and hundreds of pages long, but many earlier sequences, scenes or chapters were not preserved.
The oldest passages ought to be recognizable by the 60s-era voice. The current organization of the story dates from the early 90s. No real people are described. And yet, there is something of truth in what I have written, of an era lived through, an era in some ways startingly reminiscent of current times.
Of course the characters themselves have no immediate sense of history. To them, events have the guise of mere incidents. For countercultural types of the Nixon era, life was driven by one principle above all others: hedonism. One could be gentle and call it the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence lists life first, followed by liberty and only then by the pursuit of happiness. But nearly any real 60s freak would have rated the pursuit of happiness as more important than life itself. The old Hippies were exquisitely American. Exemptions is about a small group of people who failed to disentangle their fates from each other despite their best efforts. The little collegiate worlds of the Hippie era were much smaller than their equivalents today, far cheaper, far more Spartan, and a lot stickier.
Its original title was Fission. In the late 80s I changed its title to Astral Bodies. Finally, after a brief temptation to call it Student Exemptions, the story finally became Exemptions. Considering the numerous drafts of the book, its final version probably ought to be hundreds and hundreds of pages long, but many earlier sequences, scenes or chapters were not preserved.
The oldest passages ought to be recognizable by the 60s-era voice. The current organization of the story dates from the early 90s. No real people are described. And yet, there is something of truth in what I have written, of an era lived through, an era in some ways startingly reminiscent of current times.
Of course the characters themselves have no immediate sense of history. To them, events have the guise of mere incidents. For countercultural types of the Nixon era, life was driven by one principle above all others: hedonism. One could be gentle and call it the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence lists life first, followed by liberty and only then by the pursuit of happiness. But nearly any real 60s freak would have rated the pursuit of happiness as more important than life itself. The old Hippies were exquisitely American. Exemptions is about a small group of people who failed to disentangle their fates from each other despite their best efforts. The little collegiate worlds of the Hippie era were much smaller than their equivalents today, far cheaper, far more Spartan, and a lot stickier.
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The author and his wife, circa 1971