The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid. -- Q

When I was a boy, there were few television shows I admired more than TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY. The series was set on the fictional South Pacific island of Boragora in the years preceding WW2, and featured the exploits of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter. Jake, who traveled with an alcoholic mechanic named Corky and a one-eyed dog named Jack, and ekked out a living flying passengers and cargo around the Pacific islands. His cohorts included Bon Chance Louie, the island's governor and an ex-member of the French Foreign Legion; Sarah Stickney-White, a lounge singer who was really an American spy; the Rev. Willy Tenboom, who was really a German spy; and Koji, a half-European, half-Japanese princess whose lust for jake did not prevent her from threatening to kill him on a regular basis. During the series' run, Jake fought with the modern-day Samurai, the Nazis, giant monkeys, ancient Egyptian cults, slavers, headhunters, some kind of sea monster, and pretty much everything else you can think of. For me, however, these outrageous conflicts, some of which destroyed my suspension of disbelief even as a ten year old child, were not really the appeal of TALES: that rested in the way the world of the late 1930s was presented to the audience.

As with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the world of the 30s, particularly in areas such as South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, etc. was shown to be primitive, wild, half-unexplored, and largely lawless. Small frontier-style towns were perched on the edge of vast oceans and impenetrable jungles. Booze flowed freely. Brawls were common. Local "authorities," usually military or colonial in nature, were generally corrupt or incompetent or had a laissez-faire attitude which allowed all manner of smuggling and vice-trading to operate in plain sight. The native populations were usually depicted as either helpful and friendly or restive and hostile, but always as half-savages. Those who arrived in the islands were a mixture of greedy, desperate, or fugitive; men and women who had come to the literal end of the earth to seek fortunes or escape troubled pasts. Plantation owners in snap-brim Fedoras and white summer suits drank with dirty, grizzled prospectors with gold dust in their hair and Bowie knives on their hips: out of work mercenaries bent elbows with third-rate lounge singers too poor to buy a ticket back to civilization. Once in a while a clipper arrived, carrying sacks of mail, crates of booze, and a few mysterious new passengers. At other times a gunboat would chug into the harbor, bearing the flag of one of the colonial powers, and provoking the local spies to slink away to their hidden radio-telegraph machines to send furtive messages to their controllers. Those visits, a piano, and a working radio were the only sources of vertical entertainment: the rest was found in bedrooms or out in the jungles or upon the wild wild sea.

Notwithstanding the obvious evils of colonialism, which were not entirely lost on me even as a small boy, I cannot express how much I loved the smoky, sultry atmosphere of TALES and its disreputable cast of characters. The mere fact that an ex-Flying Tiger and an ex-Foreign Legion soldier rubbed shoulders together in the Monkey Bar every night gave me shivers. As for the idea that Jake could simply jump into his seaplane, Cutter's Goose, and fly off to an island filled with ancient gold mines, or cannibal warriors, or Japanese troops, or pirates who traded in human flesh, as easily as my Mom could take me for ice cream in our Oldsmobile, struck me as being better than any superpower.

I stress that what I am talking about here is not simply a child's love for action. If I wanted to witness action as a thing in itself, it was available to me in a dozen other different shows full of blasting guns and screeching tires. TALES offered me not merely action but adventure, which is something quite different indeed. Action works the adrenal glands, but adventure stimulates the soul. It stirs passions which are quite independent of mere thrills or simple danger. It offers us wild new experiences which we will retain long after our adrenaline high has faded and our loot spent. Action is easy to come by, but adventure, real adventure, is not, and in fact seems to be getting more elusive all the time.

Adventure, it seems, has many enemies. One of them, the foremost of them, is technology. You never saw Jake Cutter with a cell phone or a GPS system. He was often lost, and even when his aeroplane radio worked, it didn't mean anyone was listening or that help was available. Adventure requires a certain reliance on instinct and wit as well as courage -- in other words it requires self-reliance -- and one of the curious affects of technology is that it reduces our need for these things. In America, it is now very difficult to get truly lost, and one has to make an almost deliberate effort to find a spot in which some kind of help is not readily available if you really need it.

Adventure also requires ignorance. To go on an adventure is to plunge into the unknown, but we live in a world where images of every square milimeter of it is available on Google Maps,and it is now possible to get cell phone service in most of Mongolia. How do you plunge into the unknown when information and imagery on everything imaginable are available with a simple internet search? As the rain forest shrinks and roads cut their way into the most formiddable mountain chains, inaccessible places where few have tread become rarer and rarer commodities. I can't think of Indiana Jones without wondering if his modern-day counterpart might not be dismayed to find McDonald's wrappers and beer can ring tabs in what he thought was the deepest region of the Amazon or the Congo. Wherever you go, someone will have preceded you, and probably posted the pictures on Instagram.

A third enemy of adventure is government. When a new territory is "discovered" by a people, there is always a period of exploration, followed by colonization, followed by raw material exploitation, and finally, by absorption into the larger whole of the nation which discovered ("stole" or "robbed") it. Think of it as a grid. The conquering power begins with a very widely spaced net of settlements which are far-flung and have to exist largely on their own resources, without benefit (or hinderance) of real governmental power. This atmosphere invites all manner of exploiters, adventurers, criminals, speculators, prospectors, farmers, ranchers, gamblers, mercenaries, entertainers, smugglers, prostitutes, tradesmen and anything else you care to name. These folks bring much wickedness with them, but they live in an atmosphere of freedom which also allows for great adventures to take place. Over time, however, successive waves of people bring with them successive waves of governmental officers and agents; means of communication with the host nation improve; more and more control and authority are exerted and more and more laws come into effect. The successful absorption of a frontier area means that civilization has now arrived, meaning in turn that the host of adventurers who once haunted the saloons and whorehouses and docks must now either leave or "become respectable," i.e. surrender claim to further adventure. Either way, the possibility for real adventure fades as the government grid grows tighter and tighter; until at last the grid becomes a net, and one needs a permit to do anything. As the world's population grows along with knowledge, technology and the reach of government, we now face a situation where it is possible to foresee a time when the net exists everywhere, and there is a sheriff, courts, tax collector, surveillance cameras, and possibly even a goddamned HOA in Antarctica.

In a sense this time has already arrived in what we call the First World. To live a reckless, dangerous, adventurous life in a country like the United States is extremely difficult if one is not wealthy, and even then, takes on an air of poseurism, dilettanteism and fraud. What is more laughable than the millionaire who travels around the world in a hot-air balloon? We all know he simply trying to find something his money cannot buy, which is not a quest likely to engender much sympathy or inspire the broad masses. Hell, even the middle-class kid who chases adrenaline highs via sky-diving, surfing and motocross racing carries with him a whiff of desperate absurdity. He is simply manufacturing excitement for its own sake, and while there is certainly action in these activities, there is no real adventure.

Of course, it may be seen that I am no different. Everything I have done as an adult which I did not have to do, but put me at some level of physical risk, would be regarded as laughable from the standpoint of, say, a child-soldier in Africa. Dreams of adventure and even action are undoubtedly always viewed with contempt by those whose daily lives are filled with risks they have no choice but to take. And one would be well within his rights to question how much I truly want adventure or even action at this time in my life. After all, I benefit enormously from the net in which I often feel trapped. To cite one example: in my one-bedroom apartment here in large-town Pennsylvania, I have central air conditioning and heat, a dishwasher, a washer-dryer, sinks, running water, electricity, a toilet, bath and shower. And if any of this breaks down, I have only to put in a work order and maintenance men soon appear. Hell, just a few weeks ago a burner on my electric stove went out, and instead of fixing the burner, the landlord replaced the entire oven. These are some of the benefits of the net, the grid we call civilization. Yet at the same time, this cocoon of what would have been called extravagant luxury just a few generations ago is also part of the great gray force which strangles our spirit of adventure and replaces it with -- at best -- a desire for action; but even the action available to us is more and more experienced as a secondhand event, via that species of voyeurism we call television and the internet.

In writing this I do not set myself up as some kind of martyr or luddite. By and large my "conveniences" are benefits I do not wish to live without; but I am keenly aware that the effect they have on me is a softening and a diminishing one. They and GPS and Google and all the rest of it are like a comfortable straight-jacket which keeps me safe and my life orderly and comfortable, but also restricts my movements and makes my muscles atrophy. It's much harder for me to die or be wretched than it was for my ancestors circa 1560 or even 1900, but it is also spiritually rather dull.

Today I read yet another article lamenting the population decline which is occurring almost everywhere in the world. Considering that many of the newspapers that publish these articles now were at the forefront of the "overpopulation = extinction" movement which prevailed in this country for decades, I find this greatly amusing, but it speaks to my general point. Modern life, for about 1.5 billion people currently living on this planet, is a materially comfortable place, and it is precisely in the areas where life is most comfortable and safe from privations and shortages where birth rates are at their lowest point. This follows a well-known trend throughout history, which shows that birth rates automatically and steadily decrease as material prosperity rises. Human beings will not reproduce in any great numbers given the financial and technical means to avoid it.

I don't want to overreach here, but I see this as following my main point, which is that a sense of adventure is only really possible if one regards the world as a wide-open place full of exotic mysteries and exciting unknowns. Since the world is largely no longer that place, it follows that our sense of adventure has dulled. In becoming civilized and achieving the conveniences and luxuries which make life easier and less drudgerous, in reducing hunger even among the very poor, we have also freed our minds to consider the higher problems of existence. For as it has often been said, only a man with a full belly gives a damn about the higher problems of existence: the poor, hungry fellow has neither the time nor the interest. And one of the primary considerations of existence is, Why are we here? Of course there is no specific answer to that question which is not facetious, overly generalized or simplistic, but one credible answer is, "To live!" Which means in this case simply to enjoy life and not merely endure. But how is life best enjoyed? Does the washer-dryer and the 4K and the 5G equate to happiness? Not for most of us. We need something more. Like the millionaire in his hot-air balloon, we seek that which money cannot buy. We want a sense of adventure, of excitement and wonder, which is the very thing the constricting net of civilization denies us.

I don't know how this spirit can be revived in the age we live in, or whether the question is of any great importance relative to others which plague and bedevil us; but I do know I want a positive answer for my own selfish reasons, and that it is certainly important to me. To simply draw breath, take up space, and mark time until death is not enough. To simply exist in some state of comfortable material mediocrity, drawing excitement through a television screen or a monitor, is not enough. I may not be Jake Cutter, but I'm driven by the same basic forces. And they tell me that somewhere, somehow, there's a world of adventure still waiting for me. All I have to do is find it.