Tract Man

Yesterday when I walked to the post office from my work, I ran into Tract Man. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, and I was delighted to run into him. I adore Tract Man. He is a tall, thin, older white man, with a grey beard, and he’s usually wearing sunglasses, pale jeans, and long sleeves in all weathers. He carries a black backpack which I assume is full of his xeroxes. And he stands on the street corner, handing out xeroxed pages of passages of books. Most of the pages are a combination of handwritten passages and cut and pasted passages and typed passages, although some are all handwritten or all typed. Every page has a handwritten title identifying the theme of the passages. Most have some sort of marginalia that he has added to explain the passage or make his point. They’re almost like little zines.

I call him Tract Man because the literature tends to swerve into the political—although not always. Frequently, it’s actual literature: passages and quotes from books he loves, mostly non-fiction, but with a smattering of fiction thrown in. He adds to these passages his thoughts on the world, on government, on society and morality and spirituality and history and civic duty and human rights—the sky is the limit for tract man. Thoreau comes up often in his tracts, and, surprisingly so does Toynbee (who never seems to be quoted much these days by anyone). He’ll quote Ibsen and Jung together. Or Plato, Malcolm X, Ayn Rand, Camus, Carlyle, Gandhi, and Swift, all grouped together in way that would probably surprise all of them.

I enjoy his groupings, the way he arranges thoughts emotively and thematically, rather than historically or academically. His pairings and groupings are fruitful and interesting, and he doesn’t so much as argue as place ideas on a platter and hand them to you, leaving you to make of it what you will, his notations notwithstanding.

Tract Man delights me for this very reason. He stands on the street corner, handing out his xeroxed tracts, his zines, to anyone who wants one. He’ll ask you to choose what interests you if you want to read one. He never shoves them in your hands, he only offers. He’s enthusiastic if you stop to take a bundle of xeroxed papers, telling you his favorite parts and his favorite thinkers. Not everyone stops. But he’ll stand there for hours, handing out his pages.

I can’t imagine how much money he spends on his xeroxes. Or how much time he spends painstakingly copying down passages, adding his thoughts, writing carefully and legibly in his neatest handwriting, almost a font within itself. I wonder how long he has handed out his tracts, if he goes to colleges other than the one where I work to stand on the street corner and hand out pages of ideas. I wonder how heavy his backpack is. I imagine him pouring over books late at night, marking and underlining passages for a new tract, a new dispersal of thought, so that he can introduce someone to an idea he loves, to a thinker he loves, so that he can, in his own way, influence the world and make it into something better.

It’s such a small thing to do, such a personal endeavor, and Tract Man has so much passion and enthusiasm and belief and kindness that when I see him, I wave big and pick up my pace. He knows me by now, and he’s bubbles over with enthusiasm because he knows I keep all of his tracts. Sometimes he’ll hand me everything he has in his hands to take with me. And I do. I keep them all. I have pages upon pages of his notes and ideas. I read through every one. I know so much of what he believes, but I don’t know his real name. He’s just Tract Man. We never talk for long, and I don’t always see him out on the corner. But he always comes back, handing out his pages, and sometimes I happen to walk by, and see him pointing out his favorite passages with a student or another passerby, enthusiastic, nodding, smiling. And I’m always struck by what seems to be his personal mission: to hand out ideas, to offer things to read that might inspire people to read more, to think about the world around them a little differently than before.

Such a small thing, but it’s enough. I’ll take it.