Life Advice Archives - Page 5 of 10

Mr Ripley and You

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

J. Alfred Prufrock meet Tom Ripley.

Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is, according the Library of America, one of the five best American Noir novels of the 1950s. Hard to argue with the Library of America.

After publishing this novel in 1955, a quarter of a century later, Highsmith returned to Ripley for another novel. Then again in 1974, 1980 and 1991. Five novels (the Ripliad!) but 25 years between the first and the second.

I was quite surprised to learn about the other four novels once I finished this one. There is nothing in this novel which suggests four sequels. Knowing nothing about Highsmith, I have no idea why she decided to turn this into a series after two decades. It is also odd that we do not yet have a Made-for-Streaming-Service Ripliad series. The plots of the first five seasons are good to go.

The first novel really is a made for TV plot. Tom Ripley, an American of dubious moral character, cons his way into a free trip to Europe to meet with the son (Dickie) of a wealthy New Yorker, and then travels about a bit in an idle way reminiscent of The Beautiful and Damned. Eventually, and you knew this would happen because the book is in the collection Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, Ripley gets around to murdering Dickie so he can impersonate him and live off Dickie’s income. The bulk of the novel is solving all the problems that come about when trying to pull off a con of this magnitude. Suffice it to say: it is not easy to kill someone and take on their identity. You might want to think again about your plan to do so.

At that level, the novel is a pleasant enough read. Highsmith’s prose is good and the Reader gets to spend lots of time trying to imagine how to weasel out of the latest difficult as Ripley is trying to figure out the same thing. Plenty of intellectual puzzles to keep the pages turning.

There is, however, a deeper matter well worth pondering. Tom Ripley has found his way to Sicily, imitating Dickie, but has run into yet another snag:

Beyond Sicily came Greece. He definitely wanted to see Greece. He wanted to see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf with Dickie’s money, Dickie’s clothes, Dickie’s way of behaving with strangers. But would it happen that he couldn’t see Greece is Dickie Greenleaf? Would one thing after another come up to thwart him—murder, suspicion, people? He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity. The idea of going to Greece, trudging over the acropolis as Tom Ripley, American tourist, held no charm for him at all. He would as soon not go. Tears came into his eyes as he stared up at the campanile of the cathedral, and then he turned away and began to walk down a new street.

Tom Ripley likes pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf. It isn’t really about the money at all; it is about the thrill of pretending to be someone he is not. Why is that a thrill?

Highsmith cleverly sets the stage for this aspect of Tom’s personality early in the novel. Before heading to Europe, Tom in involved in an elaborate scam. Having stolen some letterhead from the Department of Internal Revenue, he sends letters to artists, writers, and other free-lance workers informing them that there was an error in their income tax forms and they owed more money. Fake phone number to call; fake address to which to send the money. The scam works; rather than fight over adjustments to their tax bills, people dutifully send checks to the fake address. Ah, but here is the twist. The checks are inevitably made out to The Department of Internal Revenue. Tom cannot cash the cheeks. He never makes a dime off the scam. He knows he will never earn anything from the scam. The scam, pretending to be someone he is not, is the whole point. Again, why is this a thrill?

There is another interesting feature of Tom Ripley’s psyche. He like to imagine things; he likes to imagine himself in situation after situation. He sets the scene, and works out the whole conversation. He goes over the situation time after time. Eventually, the imagined situation takes on the aspect of reality for Tom. He is good at pretending to be Dickie because he plays out the role of Dickie time and again in his mind. You can see the effect in the passage quoted above. Tom ruminating about how he really wants to go to Greece as Dickie, internally notes, “He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity.” Note, Tom is not saying this to anyone but himself. Yet, it is not true. It is not even remotely true. There was absolutely no reason for Tom to have murdered Dickie; no necessity at all. Yet Tom has imagined the narrative so much, it has become reality.

Why is Tom like this? Perhaps the more interesting question is: are you really that surprised that Tom is like this? Tom spends a lot of time crafting an image of himself to be seen by the world. The images he crafts happens to be those of Internal Revenue agents or wealthy sons. The images he creates of himself have different names than the one he received at birth. They aren’t really him, of course. When we think about how he is pretending to be someone he is not, we focus on the different name. Tom and Dickie are not the same person.

You do the same thing, of course. You too spend idle minutes imagining the future, picturing conversations yet to be had in your mind. You too craft an image of yourself to present to others. You do this every day. You prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

You even have multiple faces that you have crafted. You play your roles in different ways depending on the situation in which you find yourself. Sure, all these faces have the same name as you, but they are distinct personalities, distinct people, with slightly different mannerisms and ways of speaking and even, most likely, dress. You don’t really think of these images of yourself as different people than you. They really are you. Honestly. Yeah, they act a bit different than you do here or there, but it’s not like you are pretending to be someone else. Just the new you. The better you. The you that you would be if you could be. The not-so-boring you.

Tom Ripley is a cold-blooded murderer. You (hopefully) are not. But, the murder isn’t the thrill of Ripley’s life. The thrill of his life is pretending to be someone he is not. You and Tom Ripley aren’t really all that different. You too have a role you would love to be able to play for the rest of your life, to start again as that new and better person without all the baggage and problems of your current life. You have imagined many times what that life would be like. You and the Talented Mr. Ripley are not really all that different. He is just better at it than you.

Celebrating the Mundane

The Origin Story is a staple of Superheroes. But what about heroes who aren’t super? Do they also merit an origin story?

How does a perfectly normal person become a hero?

John Le Carre’s Call for the Dead is the origin story of George Smiley. Le Carre is a pen name for David Cornwell, who was a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service. Coincidentally, George Smiley is a mid-level intelligence agent in the British spy service.

Le Carre became famous writing spy novels, the best of which feature George Smiley and are canonical in the genre. (He also write some truly awful novels; a rather hit or miss author.) Smiley himself is memorable; in the movies he gets played by Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, which is not bad at all.

Call for the Dead is not only the first Smiley novel, it is the first novel Le Carre wrote. It shows. Later in life, Le Carre’s novels tended toward becoming overly lengthy endurance tests for the reader. This first novel is short and crisp.

The obvious comparison for George Smiley is James Bond. Bond had been around for about 8 years before Smiley. Bond was flashy, daring and saved the world over and over. A very popular hero; the first movie came out a year after Call of the Dead. In the movies, Bond was, of course, played by Sean Connery.

The difference between Connery and Guinness tells you a lot about the difference between Bond and Smiley. Bond is handsome and amazing and gets the gorgeous girl. Smiley is physically unattractive, boring, and…is married to a wealthy gorgeous woman! Alas, the beautiful woman runs off after two years of marriage for a hotter, younger man.

Smiley is, in other words, nothing like James Bond. He is so bland that he actually makes a good spy; nobody ever suspects the really boring guy is a spy. He just plods along through life, shocked that a beautiful woman married him, not surprised that she left him. He is smart and puzzles things out in a very plodding way.

His superiors don’t listen to him, so he quits his job as a spy. But, he still keeps thinking about the case before him. No drama. Just the equivalent of steady police work. There is spy stuff in the story, but not the crazy gizmos of the James Bond movies. Just regular boring spy stuff. How to arrange a meeting. How to pass documents to another person. How the spy organizations are structured.

Call for the Dead achieves the rare feat of making spy work seem like a thoroughly non-exciting thing. Just another day at the office as a mid-level bureaucrat doing the same sorts of things mid-level bureaucrats do in any bureaucratic large organization. What makes George Smiley heroic? Well, nothing. He isn’t heroic at all. Just a guy plodding along doing his job.

Even the title of the book is a sign of how remarkably unexceptional everything in this novel is. Smiley is looking into an apparent suicide The phone rings in the house; it is from the service that arranges to call you at a set time, like an alarm clock. The call for the dead guy is the clue that tells Smiley something is off; why would a guy about to commit suicide set an alarm clock for the following morning? Well, he wouldn’t.

No call for the dead; no story. A boring spy just happens to be there when the phone rings for a boring reason and then he plods along and works out what just happened.

So, the novel now sounds perfectly dull. But it isn’t. Le Carre writes well; he story moves along at a nice clip, and you get to watch Smiley puzzling out the big picture and then figuring out how to catch all the culprits. This isn’t a s good as the great Smiley novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and The Spy Wo Came in from the Cold), but the great novels do have the same plodding pace.

Is there a lesson here? Is there anything that makes this book rise up above a decent way to spend an evening? Sure. Reading a decently crafted tale by an author who can write well is exactly the sort of small detail that actually makes up the bulk of our lives. Most of life is not exciting events worthy of a major motion picture starring Sean Connery. Most of life is just a nondescript person like you or me doing the sorts of things we all do. I read books and write about them. I read Call for the Dead and I am writing about it. You read what wrote. This is not a bad description of life.

Sometimes it is worth reminding ourselves that a life can be worth living, and a book can be worth reading, even if it is not accompanied by trumpets and fanfare.

Seven Books

The Seven Book Challenge is one of those curious “challenges” that has been floating around social media. You know the drill: someone challenges you to post pictures of seven books. I have no idea why it is called a “challenge.”

I have a former student who recently tagged me in this challenge. Since all I do on social media is put up book reviews, just putting up pictures of seven books I enjoy seemed odd. But, I like my former student who issued this challenge, and so I feel duty bound to do something. Here it is.

Seven books. These are not the best seven books ever written. They are also not my favorite seven books. Instead, these are seven books which had a big impact on the way I think about world when I read them. There is no implied recommendation that you should read them, by the way. They are offered up purely for those of you who are interested in how I came to think about the world the way I think about it. These seven books will give you a good roadmap.

1. H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

I can’t remember how I discovered Mencken. Sometime in undergrad or grad school, I must have started seeing references to him. I don’t remember which Mencken book was the first book I picked up to read. The Chrestomathy is thus a stand-in.

Mencken’s impact on my mindset was huge. I have always been a rather curmudgeonly sort. In fact, the adjective that may best describe my intellectual mindset is “iconoclastic.” Someone says something, and I instantly start taking apart the argument. Mencken is the ultimate curmudgeon. He mocks everything in sight. A master of prose; I love reading him. But, the thing which struck me the most about Mencken was that while he was as curmudgeonly as I was, he was always cheerful about it.

Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United Sates, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?

That is a beautiful line and one I think about all the time. It has made me smile in the midst of many a bureaucratic meeting.

When I got to Mount Holyoke, the very first decoration I put up in my office was a picture of Mencken. It is still right over my desk. He always reminds me to be cheerful, no matter how annoying the world gets.

2. P. G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith

This was not the first Wodehouse book I ever read, but it is the one that cemented Wodehouse into my mindset. While Wodehouse is always funny, this is probably his funniest novel. Every Wodehouse book has fundamentally the same plot and the jokes are repeated in book after book. That is the point.

Wodehouse taught me that life is a comedy. Yes, there is a lot of pain and misery in this world. A lot. We can easily spend our lives looking at all that pain and the result will be a fully warranted despair. But, there is another way to look at the same world. It is a comedy, full of joy and happiness, punctuated with tragedy. It is a matter of perceptive. Wodehouse taught me that when you step back from life and look at it, the best reaction is to smile and laugh. The eschatological end to this world is a joyful one. Given that we have to trudge through life, we might as well focus on the joy.

3. Augustine, Confessions

I grew up with a divided mind. On the one side, I went to school and learned a lot of things. On the other side, I went to church and learned a lot of things. But, those two parts of my mind never talked to one another. There was the intellectual part that enjoyed taking ideas apart (remember, I am an iconoclast). There was the spiritual part of my life that knew what I was supposed to believe and how I was supposed to act.

Augustine caused those two parts of my mind to come crashing together. Here was a guy who was obviously brilliant, who enjoyed learning and ideas every bit as much as I do, and who thought about Christianity with exactly the same level of intellectual rigor that he thought about everything else. Reading Confessions was a moment of epiphany.

After Confessions, I could never go back to thinking about my Christian faith as somehow separate from the giant intellectual project of understanding the world. Understanding God is an intellectual project. Theology deserves exactly the same iconoclastic tendencies I brought to every other subject. Why do people believe this is true? Is it really true? I grew up certain that faith and reason belonged in separate playpens. Confessions taught me that faith is strengthened when reason works alongside it.

4. Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America

I stumbled into graduate school. Through my first three years of college, I thought I was going to go to law school. Then, at the start of my senior year, I realized I had no interest in being a lawyer. So, I applied to Ph.D. programs. I wasn’t even entirely sure what one did with a Ph.D.

Eventually I realized being professor was a pretty good job for me. Where else could I spend all my time learning things and talking about what I learned? Knowing I would enjoy being a professor is not the same thing as knowing how to be a good professor. I really had no idea what professors actually did on a day-to-day basis.

Barzun’s book taught me the idea that there is a craft to teaching and that if I was going to do this job, I really needed to perfect that craft. The number one lesson I learned from the book was that being a teacher means the job is not really about me. Teaching is for the students, not the professors. (It is depressing to think about the number of my colleagues who do not understand this.) If I was going to be a good teacher, I had to always remember that I was here to serve my students, to teach them everything I know, to impart knowledge and wisdom. The goal is that when they leave, they will lead richer and fuller lives. Teacher in America taught me to care about the craft of what I do.

Barzun’s book is the reason I always leave my office door open. It is the reason I always drop everything when a student walks into my office. It is the reason I never usher a student out the door, that office hours are whenever I am in my office. It is the reason that conversations wander all over the place. Barzun’s book taught me that being a teacher is a calling.

5. Thomas Mayer, The Structure of Monetarism

Tom Mayer is the reason I am an economist. He was a curious guy; I never really understood him, and I never had the courage to ask him a personal question. I took four undergraduate, two graduate courses, and two undergraduate independent studies with him. I was his teaching assistant 3 or 4 times. I attended a weekly department seminar with him all through graduate school. He was the author of what was at the time the best-selling money and banking textbook in the nation and yet he always found the time to meet with me.

The man was a walking encyclopedia. I remember one time in graduate school, someone asking him a question in class. He replied “I don’t know.” The student re-asked the question two more times; both the student and everyone else in the room assumed the question just wasn’t clear. It never occurred to any of us that Tom actually didn’t know the answer to a question.

The Structure of Monetarism was Tom’s most famous book; I read it in one of those independent studies, but the ideas in the book were in his textbook. What was so important about the book for me personally was that it taught me how to think about economics. I came to economics through politics. I loved political debate and economics is one of those things politicians talk about, so I figured I better learn about it. Without Tom’s influence, I suspect I would have become one of those tired political types who see economics as just another tool in a political debate. Pick your political position and then find the economic arguments to match it.

Tom was not like that. He always went the other way. Monetarism was a monetary theory largely associated with Milton Friedman. Friedman was easily the greatest monetary theorist of the post-war era. He was also a notable conservative. What The Structure of Monetarism demonstrated is that politics and monetary theory are not equivalent. You could be a conservative and reject monetarism or you could be a liberal and accept monetarism. Indeed, monetarism is not even a monolithic idea, but a hodgepodge of a whole bunch of different ideas. You could easily accept some, but not all of the parts of monetarism. (There is even massive complicated diagram showing which parts are related to which other parts.)

What Tom taught me more than anything else was that if you want to be a serious scholar, you have to subordinate politics. First figure out the facts or build the model to explain the facts. Policy conclusions may or may not follow from the model. But if you use politics to help build the model, then you will never build a good model. Ideas are more important than politics.

6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

In my second year of graduate school, I realized that all I was doing was reading economics. I decided I did not want to be someone who only read economics, and so I made a plan that every day I would read books totally unrelated to economics. It was the most important decision of my intellectual life.

I had no idea how to become a reader, though. I had no guide. So, I just started reading books I heard about. I had heard about Faulkner. What I knew about Faulkner was this: he was really hard to understand. That is quite honestly the only thing I knew about Faulkner.

I remember wondering why, with all the books in the world, anyone would ever bother to read a book that was hard to understand. Surely there were better books, like, for example, ones that you could understand. Then at a library book sale, there was As I Lay Dying and for a quarter I could buy it. I am not sure what possessed me to buy it.

I started reading it. By page 4 or 5, I had no idea what was going on. I reread the first few pages and still had no idea what was going on. Faulkner’s reputation was merited. I almost tossed the book aside. Then, again for a reason I do not recall, I decided to just keep reading. Wow. The book was terribly confusing, but gradually the fog lifted and by the end, everything all made sense. I never had that experience before. I realized then and there that there is something beautiful about reading, that it allows for exactly that experience of just letting the book do the work and going along for the ride and enjoying the process of discovery.

7. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems

I hated poetry ever since my 10^th grade English class. Even though I had eventually become a reader, I never read poetry. The memories of that class killed any hope of enjoyment. But, eventually, after I had finished grad school and was teaching at the kind of place where the liberal arts are the thing we espouse, I realized that going through life hating poetry was not what I really wanted to do. I decided I should learn about poetry.

I was in Hailey, Idaho visiting my mom, went to a thrift store, and found a book of poetry that contained the poem I decided I should start reading. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” All I knew about the poem was that it was important. I settled down one night to read it and I had absolutely no idea what I was reading. None. It was incomprehensible gibberish.

Remembering my experience with Faulkner, I persisted. I read the poem over and over, night after night. Eventually I started noticing things; eventually I started to see a structure. Eventually I realized that poetry could actually do things that prose could not do. Eventually I started reading poetry.

Over the years, I have read Eliot many times. He is the poet to whom I most often turn. His poetry has formed the background music of my life. He is the poet to whom I turned when tragedy hit. Eliot wrestles with exactly the same questions with which I wrestle. Eliot is the one who creates words to capture that which cannot be explained in any other way. If you want to know what it is like to think about the world the way I think about it, read Eliot.

Personal Legends: Yours and Mine

“And what went wrong when other alchemists tried to make gold and were unable to do so?”

“They were only looking for gold,” his companion answered. “They were seeking the treasure of their Personal Legend, without wanting actually to live out the Personal Legend.”

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is a tale of a journey. It is one of those philosophical novels that skips along lightly through the philosophy as we watch Our Hero discover the Meaning of Life. Minor characters come and go, each leaving their footprints in the sand, pointing the way to Discovery. Books like this are legion; there are enough of them that they probably even have a genre name, but (alas) I have no idea what it is. It’s not exactly a bildungsroman, but it is like a cousin of that genre.

Within this Yet-To-Be-Named Genre, The Alchemist is pretty good. The story is charming. Santiago, the hero, is a Spanish shepherd, who has a dream and embarks on a journey to find his treasure at the Great Pyramids. He is a persistent lad, overcoming obstacles and finding friends with his winning manner. It is, in other words, a perfect graduation gift.

But, it isn’t the book itself that intrigues me right now. It is the story of how I came to be reading this book right now.

The Great Coronavirus Semester just ended. Before the college shutdown, I had a class in which we just read books and got together to talk about them. When everyone went home, I told the students to just read a book and send me their thoughts about it. Seemed like a good way to finish off a class which was really never anything more than that in the first place.

There was a student in the class whom I had never met before the start of the semester. Great student who obviously loved reading books and talking about them. Exactly the sort of student with whom I always enjoy conversations. She’ll do well in life. A few weeks after the shutdown, she sent me her reflections on the book she read, which was (surprise plot twist) The Alchemist.

Now this novel has been on my “I should probably get around to reading it” list forever (well, technically not “forever” since the book was only published in the early 90s). So when I saw my student had just written a long reflection on it, I figured this was as good a time as any to read it.

The student’s reflections were fascinating. The story of the novel wove right into the story of her life and it all ended on a remarkably hopeful note looking at the future with determination. This student just graduated and is off on her journey to fulfill her Personal Legend. I have high hopes for her.

But, reading the novel and thinking about what my former student wrote about the novel led, naturally enough to thinking about my own Personal Legend.

The boy didn’t know what a person’s “Personal Legend” was.
“It’s what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is.
“At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend.”

So, what is mine? What is it I wanted to accomplish in life? Well, first, and presumably most obviously, build a life with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator and raise kids of whom we could both be proud. Check!

But then there is also this: to learn and to know and to pass on that learning and knowing to others.

My Personal Legend is to lead a life in books. But that life in books comes from interactions with my students. They inspire me to read more books and then I do everything I can to pass the inspiration back to other students.

The Alchemist turned into the metaphor of my Personal Legend. I taught a seminar that inspired a student to realize that reading books and thinking about her life was a marvelous way to live. She read this book, and wrote about how the book had become part of the warp and woof of her life. That inspired me to read the book and I realized how much the book was showing that my Personal Legend made me one of the minor characters in the lives of my students, helping them to set out on the journey of their Personal Legends. And, it is not the goal that is important, it is the journey. You can’t reach the goal of your Personal Legend without the journey of your Personal Legend.

And so, I read books. And I talk with my students about those books. And now I talk with you, Dear Reader, about these books.

At this time of Graduations, The Alchemist teaches this message: Don’t just think about the goals of your life. Don’t just want to have the gold you made. Remember that your Personal Legend is not the goal, it is the journey to the goal. That journey is happening even today. Today, you can take one step in the journey of your Personal Legend. Just one step. Not a big step. Not the overwhelming leap over the chasm that is in the way. Just one small step. The journey matters. The journey, after all, is your life.

A Second-Rate Potter

Late in his life, T.S. Eliot took to writing plays in verse.

I don’t know why; he was never going to be a great playwright.

But, I guess when you are famous, you can do whatever you want.

A couple of his plays have some amazing bits in them. Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party both work well if you think of them as verse in play form. That is entirely different from being great plays, though. A couple of his plays are not good verse or play, containing rather a few scattered interesting lines here and there (The Family Reunion and The Elder Statesmen).

The Confidential Clerk is only one of his plays that I can imagine making a good, you know, play. Acted right, it could be good. There are also some interesting philosophical matters in it. The ideas and the verse aren’t as good as in his best two plays, but there is actually a plot that makes the thing a play. I’m not entirely convinced I would go out to see a production of it, though.

How to describe it? “Sort of like Twelfth Night, but if J. Alfred Prufrock was the main character.”¹ The Prufrock comparison is perfect as the discussion below will show. Twelfth Night stands in for one of those plays where everyone is mistaken for someone else and in the end everything gets sorted out. I am not sure that Twelfth Night is really the best comparison, though. The Confidential Clerk is more like one of those drawing room comedies where we are surprised by finding out who all the characters really are. But Eliot would like the Shakespeare comparison more, so let’s give it to him. (Plus, we might as well be charitable to Shakespeare when we have the chance—he really is as good as Eliot.)

The philosophical problem around which the play is centered is the question of identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who do others think you are? One might think that it would be a good idea if the answer to all three of those questions is the same. But as the wealthy financier notes, he really wanted to be a potter, but he had to give up that dream:

Because I came to see
That I should never have become a first-rate potter.
I didn’t have it in me. It’s strange, isn’t it.
That a man should have a consuming passion
To do something for which he lacks the capacity?
Could a man be said to have a vocation
To be a second-rate potter?

Is there something wrong with being second-rate potter?

If your dream is to be a first-rate potter, but you only have the choice of being a second-rate potter or a first-rate financier, which is the better option? There is no doubt that the entire educational apparatus these days tells you to be first-rate. Thoreau, meanwhile, screams at you to proudly be a potter.

But, the deeper question is more than the old debate of what you should do with your life. Is it possible that your vocation, your calling in life, is to be a second-rate potter? Is it possible that being a second-rate potter isn’t just settling into a life you prefer, but actually the very best use of your time on earth? Is it possible that you will do more good as a second-rate potter than as a first-rate financier? Why couldn’t you have a calling to be mediocre? And, if that is your calling, your vocation, your purpose in life, shouldn’t you proudly pursue it?

As the young protégé replies,

Indeed, I have felt, while you’ve been talking.
That it’s my own feelings you have expressed,
Although the medium is different. I know
I should never have become a great organist,
As I aspired to be. I’m not an executant;
I’m only a shadow of the great composers.
Always, when I play to myself,
I hear the music I should like to have written.
As the composer heard it when it came to him;
But when I played before other people
I was always conscious that what they heard
Was not what I hear when I play to myself.
What I hear is a great musician’s music.
What they hear is an inferior rendering.
So I’ve given up trying to play to other people:
I am only happy when I play to myself.

Is he right to give up his dream?

Moreover, when you abandon the vocation you thought you had when you realized you would always be second-rate, can you really build a new life on make-believe?

My father— your grandfather— built up this business
Starting from nothing. It was his passion.
He loved it with the same devotion
That I gave to clay, and what could be done with it—
What I hoped I could do with it. I thought I despised him
When I was young. And yet I was in awe of him.
I was wrong, in both. I loathed this occupation
Until I began to feel my power in it.
The life changed me, as it is changing you:
It begins as a kind of make-believe
And the make-believing makes it real.

The problem is obvious. You can be successful by outward measures in your make-believe world. You may even move from success to success to success. But, inside, you’ll always know:

If you have two lives
Which have nothing whatever to do with each other—
Well, they’re both unreal.

There is the Prufrock problem:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

How long can you keep this up? If the person you are is not the same as the person you want to be, and if neither of those is the person the world sees, how long can you keep going? Is this triple life you are leading really better than just being a second-rate potter and feeling satisfied and happy in being a second-rate potter and having the world knew you are a second-rate potter?

Eliot’s solution to this problem in the play is cheating. It is, in fact, so transparently a cheat that Eliot surely knew it was. It is almost like Eliot knew he was a second rate playwright, but he really wanted to write plays.

¹Izzy Baird, personal communication, April 7, 2020.
[Yeah, Izzy really wanted a footnote.]

Choose Again

Charles Krauthammer was a reasonably well-known political essayist who died in 2018.

His son, Daniel, subsequently edited a collection of his father’s essays, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors.

The book as a whole is a nice trip down memory lane over the last few decades, recalling the political and cultural flashpoints which once seemed like the most important things in the world. Krauthammer was politically conservative but of a genial disposition, so for the most part there was nothing abrasive about his columns. Remember when people just disagreed instead of violently disagreed?

The most striking part of the book was not the political commentary. The final section of the anthology has a few bits reflecting on how to lead a life worth living. The remarks in this section bear repeating.

First some biographical background. Krauthammer had an unusual career path, to put it mildly. He started out post-collegiate life as a psychiatrist. He went to medical school, got his degree, and went into practice. But, then one fine day when he was 30, he quit his job and began life anew writing political commentary. As Krauthammer quipped about the change in careers:

There is not very much difference: In both lines of work I spend my days studying people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur—except that in Washington they have access to nuclear weapons. Which makes the stakes higher, and the work a little more interesting.

That change in career is most noteworthy. It relates to a conversation I have with students all the time. More times than I could possibly count, I have had a conversation with a student who is tortured by indecision and angst about her future. Looking for a summer job (make that a summer internship…nobody has a mere summer job anymore), looking for a job after graduation, deciding on graduate school, planning a whole life—it is always a similar conversation. The student has no idea what to do, feels bad about not knowing what to do, agonizes about what to do. The pain of the unknown is visible.

My advice: relax. One of the little known secrets of college is that nobody knows what they want to do with their life when they are still in college. Some people think they know, but they are wrong—they don’t actually know. They may get lucky and their guess about what they wanted to do was right, but even in those cases, they didn’t really know. Until you graduate from college, you simply have no idea what life is like when you are working or living on your own.

Up through graduation, the next step in life was always known. Sophomores become juniors whether in high school or college. But at whatever point you leave school, high school or college, you suddenly embark on the great unknown. You’ve sailed off the edge of the map. There be dragons.

How do you do this? You get a job which will pay the bills, get a place to live and start plugging away at life. And then sometime between 6 and 18 months after you leave school, you start to figure out what it is you like about life, what it is you want to do. It is only after you have left school and realized there are no more summer vacations and Christmas vacations and all the free time during the week that you begin to realize what you do and do not like to spend your days doing.

And so, I tell my students, stop being so worried about this summer or your first job out of school. Just find something you think you would like to do that will pay the bills. And then go do that. You can always change your mind in a year and try something else.

Enter Krauthammer:

I never wrote a word, I never published a word before I was 30. And the reason I bring this up is because I want to speak to the young students here tonight about choice, about choosing a life.
When you are at this stage you are at right now all life is open to you. But soon you are going to suffer the agony of excellence. With so many talents and so much excellence, at one point in your life soon you’re going to have to choose. And every choice means an exclusion; every time you open a door, you’re closing a door.

It is exactly that fear of closing doors that paralyzes the modern student. Their lives have been conditioned to constantly worry about missing out. FOMO is a real disease among students. It is one of the reasons they are glued to their screens. Is there something better going on right now? Am I missing something?

Krauthammer’s advice:

The moral of the story is: Don’t be afraid to choose, and don’t be afraid to start all over if you have to. T. E. Lawrence once said, at least in the version of his life by David Lean, “Nothing is written.”
And by that he meant: Life is open, everything is choice, nothing is inevitable. So the message I have to you young people is: Don’t be afraid to choose. Choose what you love. And if you don’t love what you’ve chosen, choose again.

That is truly excellent advice. And not just for college students. For everyone. Lots of people get stuck because they think they have no choices. But you do. Nothing is written. If you don’t love what you’ve chosen, choose again.

Related Posts
Coehlo, Paulo The Alchemist “Personal Legends: Yours and Mine”
Fitzgerald, F ScottThe Beautiful and Damned, “A Cautionary Tale”