Life Advice Archives - Page 8 of 10

Episodes of Grace

An Episode of Grace is a collection of short stories by Linda McCullough Moore. The title of the collection is apt. Yes, one of the stories bears the same name, but really every story in the collection could have that title.

The stories present an interesting way to think about life.

It seems obvious to think of our lives as akin to a novel. There was a beginning, someday there will be an end, and we spend our lives working out the middle. The events of our lives are all part of the larger story.

In those larger scale stories, however, there are those short stories, the small parts of our lives that could be taken out of the novel and presented as a whole and complete story unto themselves. We all have these short stories; indeed when we tell people about the episodes in our lives, we are relating those short stories. We have no real ability to relate the novel of our lives; we don’t yet know how it all turns out.

But, Moore points to yet another dimension of our lives. The episodes. Those brief moments, hardly noticeable, whose reflections ripple outward. Among those moments are the episodes of grace; those moments when the burden of life is lifted ever so slightly by a passing comment or a stunning sunset.

Reading about those moments of grace, I had a shock of recognition.

One of the curious things about being a professor is that I say a lot of good-byes. Every year, there is a whole set of students who are leaving Mount Holyoke. Some of them I will never see again. Sometimes a student comes back for a reunion or just visiting the campus, and we pick up right where we left off in the conversation. Sometimes I get an e-mail out of the blue from a former student. (I always like those e-mails.) Sometimes, I stay in regular contact with a student.

But, in every case, no matter which of those futures will materialize, there is that moment of good-bye.

One result of all these relationships, really friendships, in which neither of us knows whether or when we will talk again is that there is a comment I hear frequently. It is the sort of thing you don’t say to someone you know you will be seeing again. It is what you say when someone is leaving and you know this may be the last chance you have to say it. I cannot count the number of times a student has looked at me and said in a tone of deep gratitude, “I just want to thank for that time you said X to me.”

Here is the interesting thing: I don’t always remember saying X. I remember talking with the student. For some of them I remember having those long conversations which ramble all over the place. Others, I only talked with once or twice when they were taking a class with me. But, I don’t always remember the conversation in which I said X.

It is a weird feeling. Here is someone thanking me for saying something deeply meaningful, something which made her life a bit better, and I do not recall saying it.

I now know what to call those comments. They are episodes of grace. They are brief, not always memorable to the person saying them, but full of grace for the person hearing them.

We have all experienced these episodes of grace and we are grateful for them. But, before reading Moore’s book, I had never really thought about being a creator of episodes of grace.

What would it look like to actively work at creating episodes of grace in the lives of others? Interesting thought experiment. Imagine living your life thinking that the conversations you are having may be the single most important conversation the person with whom you are talking will have this year or this decade. Imagine that the comment you are about to make will be remembered in a decade by the other person.

If you think too much about that, it would be nearly impossible to have a conversation. So, how do you cultivate a life where you are unconsciously providing those episodes of grace?

I don’t have the answer, but it is hard for me to escape the conclusion that this is the sort of thing I really should figure out. The world could use more episodes of grace.

Reading For Pleasure

Reading is the only hobby in which the act of reading about the hobby is engaging in the hobby. As a result, books about reading are always intriguing to those who like to read.

Consider Alan Jacob’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

It is a charming book, full of wit and insight. If you like reading, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy it as much as I did.

But (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), there is a thread to Jacobs’ argument that seriously annoyed me. It is an argument I have seen many times and it makes me inwardly groan every time.

When a kindred spirit makes a wrong-headed argument, it certainly galls much more than when a philistine makes the same argument. And, so I take it up here because I like Jacobs’ book so much.

Jacobs begins his book with a takedown of Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book.

I have mentioned this book many times when talking with students, and I have on occasion even recommended it. What is good about it is very good.

The good parts: Reading Adler and Van Doren was the first time I ever realized that different books need to be read in different ways. Reading novels requires a fundamentally different type of reading than reading poetry or history or science. Second, reading non-fiction is not the same as reading a murder mystery; in a non-fiction book, it is perfectly legitimate to look at the table of contents to see where a book is going. (Strange as it may sound, this was truly a revelation to me.) Third, skimming through a book to see the overall argument is also a perfectly acceptable thing to do; indeed some books should only be skimmed. All that and more. I learned a lot from this book.

But, Jacobs is entirely correct to chide Adler and Van Doren for what is bad about their book. It has a rather officious tone. It does not suggest, it orders; it never even attempts to entice the reader into its many insights. It sets them down as rules like a strict taskmaster. This is how you must read; this is how you must comment in the margins; these are the books you must read.

Jacobs will have none of that. Instead he suggests reading at whim. He likes that word, “whim.” Pick up whatever book strikes your whim, and enjoy. Don’t look for lists telling you what books you should read. Just read whatever strikes your fancy.

So far, so good, and if the book had ended at this point, I would have thought it was dead-on accurate. Convincing people to enjoy reading is much needed. It is good to show that reading whatever strikes your fancy is vastly better than not reading at all because you feel obligated to read books you do not want to read. But then, as the pages rolled on, Jacobs clarifies his argument, and therein is the problem.

As Jacobs notes, if his book’s only suggestion was to Read at Whim, then it would have ended at page 25. But, he wants to clarify his meaning. What if, for example, I don’t know what books I want to read? What if I want to read good books, Great Books even? How do I find them? If I am to avoid like the plague all the lists of “Books Everyone Should Read,” how will I find those books I would enjoy reading?

Here is where Jacobs gets into serious trouble. Take someone who enjoys The Chronicles of Narnia or Dickens or Austen or Tolkien. (Those are his examples.) He notes that if you have fallen in love with any of those books, your whim will naturally take you downstream, to books that followed the book you loved. Sadly, most of those books are not as good as the one you loved.

So, instead, turn upstream. Find the books that influenced the author you love. Here you will find books that are “fascinating, illuminating—but also, yes, challenging. ‘Challenging’ is precisely what the (downstream) imitators usually are not, but that means they’re not all that rewarding either.”

Uh…where to start. First, can we note that Austen and Lewis and Tolkien are themselves downstream authors? If we take this advice seriously, then what we should all be reading is Homer and the Bible—can’t get more upstream than that.

Second, can we note that most of the books upstream from whichever author you want to mention are not very good? That the bulk of what Austen would have read was just as poor as the bulk of what followed her? Unless…and this is the crucial point…when we turn upstream, we make a point of only reading the good upstream books. And to know which books those are, well, we have to have some sort of knowledge of which books are good. And if we have that, then is there some reason we can’t use the same mechanism to find good downstream books?

And, third, look at the adjectives Jacobs uses to praise the upstream books: fascinating, illuminating, and challenging. He has just created a set of criteria that suggests some books are better to read than other books.

Because Jacobs wants to preserve the idea of whimsical reading, however, he never wants to fully acknowledge that maybe some guidance is necessary. And that is what gets him into the problem that really annoys me.

In a section entitled “The triumphant return of Adler and Van Doren,” Jacobs returns to the idea that different books need to be read in different ways to explain how he can reconcile his admonitions on how to read some books while at other times arguing just to follow your whim.

Jacobs, borrowing from Adler and Van Doren, says there are three types of reading and that we need to make a clear distinction which type of reading we are doing before we set off on a journey with a book. There is reading for information. There is reading for understanding. And, there is reading for pleasure.

And, I wrote “Argh!!” in the margin. (Really.)

Let’s take Jacobs’ book as an example.

I read it for information—I wanted to learn more places I could read Great Books’ authors writing about reading and I assumed Jacobs would have some interesting pointers. He did.

I read it for understanding—I wanted to understand more about the act of reading in the modern age which is so full of distractions so that I could more fully understand why my students have a hard time immersing themselves in a book. There was a great deal of insight into this phenomenon.

I read it for pleasure—I wanted to read an author who knows how to write in a pleasant conversational tone full of clever wit and interesting anecdotes about a subject both he and I love. As noted, above, I truly derived much pleasure from this book.

So which is Jacobs’ book: is it a book to read for information, understanding, or pleasure? If it is one of the first two types, does that mean I shouldn’t have enjoyed it? If I am reading a book for pleasure, does that mean I should never pause and look up and think about it, or mark a passage I particularly love (or hate)?

This idea that reading for pleasure is somehow a distinct act from reading for other purposes is one of the most pernicious ideas about reading. It tells the reader that you can either pick up a book because you will derive pleasure from it or you can pick up a book because you will learn something from it or derive some deep understanding from it. And given those two choices, which one is the better, more virtuous choice? Mere pleasure? Or learning?

We read because it is pleasurable and useful. Indeed, the very thing that makes a book a Great Book is that when read, it brings intense pleasure and it brings deep understanding and it is full of information. It is the complete package. That is the goal.

So, read for pleasure. Always. And as you do, you will discover that the books that bring the greatest pleasure also bring the deepest insights into this world.

But, if you tell others at the outset that you need to remember this is a Great Book, so it is useful or insightful, and not pleasurable, then it is highly unlikely that others will learn to enjoy reading those books.

In the end, I am happy to recommend Jacobs’ book. I don’t recommend it because it is full of information or that it is full of deep insight. It is both of those things, but that is not why I recommend it. Read Jacobs’ book because it is a pleasure to read it. If you like reading, you will enjoy this book.

How to Love Your Neighbor

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated the absolute absurdity of everything, that the world is just one meaningless act after another. (A review of Cat’s Cradle is here.)

What then? His next novel presented a challenge. Does he simply double down on the meaninglessness of everything or is there some way out of this trap?

That novel was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Vonnegut’s universe is still meaningless. But, a meaningless universe creates a new problem.

There are still people living in that meaningless universe. What do you do about all the people living meaningless lives in a meaningless universe but who do not know the universe is meaningless and so don’t know they are just supposed to laugh at how meaningless everything is?

The temptation is just to ignore them. After all, if you are faced with a meaningless universe, why not just enjoy yourself? And if you have wealth and live in a meaningless universe, then why not just hang out with all the Beautiful people, and you and the other wealthy Beautiful people can enjoy a beautiful life in a meaningless universe?

Should you worry about all those other people? Why bother? They are all sort of…repulsive and low-class, anyway…right?

Eliot Rosewater, the Mr. Rosewater of the title of the book, has more inherited wealth than he can spend. And he makes a discovery.

“I look at these people, these Americans,” Eliot went on, “and I realize that they can’t even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war—not any more, Sylvia—I’m going to be an artist.”
“An artist?”
“I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”

That was published in…1965. Imagine a large swath of Americans who have become largely irrelevant. As the Vonnegut surrogate in the novel explains:

“In time almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine too….Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn’t here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel.”

So, imagine a society divided with the Good, Beautiful People on the one side and Pointless, Pedestrian, Boring, Low-class people on the other side. Imagine a person from the Good, Beautiful side of the tracks decided to love the latter set of people—and love them not from afar, but actually move into the neighborhood and help them out whenever they had a need, a real immediate need, like needing someone to talk with at 3 AM or someone to help out on the volunteer fire department.

If you knew someone who did that, who walked away from an Ivy League Education to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, just to live there and be with those people, what would you call someone like that? Insane, perhaps?

And therein is the plot of this Vonnegut novel. Is Eliot Rosewater insane?

It is an eerie book to read these days, by the way. This idea of a whole set of Americans who are angry because they feel useless and ignored and don’t like feeling useless and ignored, well…what would happen if they actually existed and then 50 years later they still actually existed and they were still angry that they felt useless and ignored? Not a rhetorical question, obviously.

So, Vonnegut is providing an interesting answer to his problem from Cat’s Cradle. It is all well and good to say that we live in a pointless world, where there are no higher goals or causes which can give our lives meaning; in fact if you are one of the wealthy, beautiful people, the type of people who have nice college educations and buy books by Kurt Vonnegut, then it is even fun to think about a world like that and imagine we live in a world like that, and even live as if we live a world like that.

But, if you are one of those people out there living in a small town like Rosewater, Indiana, well, you might not be enjoying your life as much as those people reading Cat’s Cradle and laughing at the pointlessness of it all.

And, maybe, just maybe, those people reading Cat’s Cradle should think about what it must be like for those other people and do something crazy like, you know, love them. Not love them from afar in some abstract, “I love humanity” way. But, love them enough to set aside all their privileges and become like one of them.

A radical idea that. Imagine the Social Justice Warrior who instead of joining a non-profit in Downtown Manhattan or a nice College Town and working to solve the world’s problems from a nice one-bedroom apartment near cute vegetarian restaurants, imagine that person just deciding to move to Rosewater, Indiana or the equivalent town in Nowhere America and get a job at Wal-Mart and just live with people and love them. That would be a radical act.

Of course this is all just silly talk. What kind of person would voluntarily set aside all the trappings of a very nice life and endure such humbling as to actually live with, among, and like the lowly, unworthy beings?

Empty yourself and become a servant? Yeah, that would be insane.

Embracing Your Inner Psmith

It comes to all of us in the end. The school years finish. Done. Finding ourselves poised at that moment between the rolling years of school and the endless plains of the Rest of Life, what book should we read, dear Comrade? What book sets forth the stark choices facing us all at that moment?

P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City.

Mike and Psmith (“There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis”), school chums whose antics were chronicled in Mike and Psmith, are, for unrelated reasons, suddenly removed from the pleasantries of school and sent off to work at The Bank. And, Mike finds the prospect dismal.

There are some people who take naturally to a life of commerce. Mike was not of these. To him the restraint of the business was irksome. He had been used to an open-air life, and a life, in its way, of excitement. He gathered that he would not be free till five o’clock, and that on the following day he would come at ten and go at five, and the same every day, except Saturdays and Sundays, all the year round, with a ten days’ holiday. The monotony of the prospect appalled him.

That is work. Stripped to its essence that is exactly what work is. Yes, some people do work outside, and some people travel, and some people work in non-profits, and some people work at their homes, and some people get high pay, and some people get no pay, but one way or another, work is, day after day, the endless repetition, day after day, of the same thing, yes, day after day.

Students do not know this, of course. The school years are different. Two weeks of vacation at Christmas, three months of summer (four if you go to Mount Holyoke!), spring breaks, Thanksgiving breaks, and an assortment of other breaks. School days end well before five. And everyone knows that no matter how bad your teachers are this year, next year at least you get a new set of teachers (well, unless you are home-schooled).

Students, by and large, imagine the time when school will finally end and then get real life begins. They imagine the exciting prospects of The Job. Jobs are exciting. You do exciting things with interesting people and everyone enjoys the days. Worst case, and I mean worst case, you end up with a job at something like Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, and your life has its dull moments to be sure, but it is punctuated by all those zany antics.

Sure, everyone knows RealJob ™ is not the same as The Office™; Real Jobs are never as boring as the TV Show pretends they are.

Then work actually starts, and it hits everyone somewhere between six and eighteen months after graduation; this is forever.

That is the decision moment. And that is the moment when Psmith in the City is most needed.

Mike Jackson facing that prospect of the unchanging tedium of life, gets depressed. Very depressed. “The sunshine has gone out of his life.” This is a perfectly normal reaction to looking with a brutally honest examination at the future.

Psmith has exactly the same job. He also does not want to be there. His first words on showing up at work: “Commerce has claimed me for her own. Comrade of old, I, too, have joined this blighted institution.”

But, that is where the comparison stops. Faced with the tedium of work, Psmith does not despair. He makes a game of the whole thing. He decides to enjoy himself. His irritable boss, Rossiter, walks up to demand to know what he is doing there, and Psmith begins the fun:

‘I tell you, Comrade Rossiter, that you have got hold of a good man. You and I together, not forgetting Comrade Jackson, the pet of the Smart Set, will toil early and late till we boost up this postage department into a shining model of what a postage department should be. What that is, at present, I do not exactly know. However. Excursion trains will be run from distant shires to see this postage department. American visitors to London will do it before going on to the Tower. And now,’ he broke off, with a crisp businesslike intonation, ‘I must ask you to excuse me. Much as I have enjoyed this little chat, I fear it must now cease. The time has come to work. Our trade rivals are getting ahead of us. The whisper goes round, “Rossiter and Psmith are talking, not working,” and other firms prepared a pinch our business. Let me Work.’

Ok, you may not want to talk like that at your workplace.

But, do not miss the deeper message here. Work in the postage department at the New Asiatic Bank is boring, very boring. Rossiter is an unfriendly manager and Rossiter’s manager is the even worse Mr. Bickersdyke. There are no prospects for enjoying this job. Mike knows that full well.

But, Psmith refuses to let the circumstances depress him, and in his own merry way finds amusement in everything.

That is the choice: do you want to be Mike or Psmith?

I am often asked if I like my job and I always talk about how much I love my job. I truly do love my job. And when I talk about how wonderful it is, people believe me that it is a wonderful job.

But, here is the funny thing. I have lots of colleagues who have exactly the same job I have. And they do not love their job. At all. Come around the school on a Friday afternoon in the middle of July or October and you can instantly tell who loves this job. They are the ones who are cheerfully working. Most of my colleagues are not here. At times, one might suspect what many of my colleagues like most about their job is that nobody chastises them when they do not come to work.

That is the real challenge of your life after school. You can’t change the fact that there is an inherent monotony to your daily tasks. But, you can decide how you are going to respond to that monotony.

Embrace your inner Psmith. Remember that no matter how bleak work gets, put it in its proper perspective. Decide you enjoy it. Even if you don’t think you enjoy it, just decide to enjoy it. It won’t always work, some days you will loathe it. But, honestly, will you enjoy it any more if you drag yourself in every day thinking about how much you hate it? Try entering with a smile and telling everyone what a marvelous day it is because you are now there, ready and excited to Work.

How to Convince Students to Read?

A while back, I discussed Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education.

As I noted in the review, I didn’t learn much reading his book. But in a strange way, it sure inspired me.

It was one of those books which frequently made me pause and think. Why Teach? Why am I a Teacher? What is my goal?

Teaching, really teaching, in the modern college is tough. Very tough.

I love my students. I really do. But, truth be told, and it is not a pleasant thing to tell myself, most of my students, whom I dearly love, do not actually want an education. Most of my students just want an A and a diploma. The tough part of teaching, the really tough part, is figuring out a way to convince those students who just want an A and a diploma that maybe they should want something else. Maybe they should want to pause and get an education.

The students who want an education are easy and fun to teach. Professor, student, Great Book—an amazing education. I love teaching those students.

But, how to convince the majority of my students that this is what they should want, that their lives will be richer and fuller if they momentarily forget about that A and that diploma and just think about Truth?

Therein lies the thing I started pondering deeply while I was reading Edmundson’s book and have been pondering ever since. I too have been playing the kinder, gentler Jeremiah—not with my colleagues, but with my students. I have been using gentle enticements to try to lull my students into a new set of desires.

I have been trying to model a Joy of Learning, and hoping that the spirit will catch on. And it has worked on many, many students. But not all. If I am honest, not even most. Maybe, and here is the intriguing part, just maybe the kinder, gentler approach should be accompanied by methods more dramatic.

I’ll give an example. In my macroeconomic theory course—textbook intermediate level course required of all majors—I have long been assigning supplemental books, books which normal people buy at a bookstore and read. I assign three a semester, tell students to just read them and enjoy them. I then ask painfully simple exam questions about them—as I tell students up front, if you read the book, you will know the answer. A few students read the books—it is surprising, quite honestly, how few. Students don’t read anymore. Yet I keep putting these books in the course because for the students who do settle into a comfortable chair and just read for the pleasure of reading, there is that gentle enticement to the realization that learning stuff just for the joy of learning it is rather enjoyable.

A couple of years ago, one of those supplemental books I assigned was Chernow, The House of Morgan. It is a massive doorstop of a book. I assigned it knowing full well that most students wouldn’t read it. After all, the previous semester, most students didn’t read Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys, which is short, quick, and lively.

So, I figured since most students don’t read no matter how quick and easy the book is, why not throw in a longer supplemental book which will be immensely wonderful for that small minority of students who take it up and read it? I assigned that book before I read Edmundson’s book. But, now I am wondering—shouldn’t I do this every semester, shouldn’t I do more to convince students that spending one month reading just 25 pages a night of a magisterial history book is something worth doing?

One thing is certain, I will fail to convince economics majors that they should want to read something like The House of Morgan. It should not be a tough sell. After all, if you are going to major in Economics and want to work on Wall Street, then you should be interested in the history of the Morgans. I have no hesitation is saying that emphatically. My students should want to read this book. It is a wonderful book. I can even add that the semester I did this, I had a student come in late in the semester with her dog-earned, well-marked up copy saying that not only was it the best book she had read in college, she had bought a copy for her father for Christmas. It’s that good.

Indeed, if you are at all interested in the word of finance, you, Dear Reader, should also read it. You can even click on the link, go straight to Amazon and buy a copy. A mere twenty-five (25!) pages a day and you can read it in a month. And, it is really good.

Most of my students did not and would not want to read this book. It is 720 pages of text—a longer book than most of them have ever read. But, don’t be too hard on my students. How many readers of this blog do you think clicked the link above to buy a copy of the book?

So, how do I teach my students to want to read more? Anything I do to convince them they should want to read a book like The House of Morgan will a) at best convince a very few more students to read it and b) certainly annoy and offend lots of students who resent being told that their preference sets should be altered. If Edmundson and I are right about the problems of the modern college, then this shouldn’t even be a hard decision to make. Obviously I should do more.

Why Teach? Because Teaching can improve the lives of my students. There is no other reason to teach. It’s not about the grades, it’s not about the diplomas, it’s not about making students happy. It is about improving lives.

My students don’t know that. I do.

Yeah, it’s out of fashion to suggest that professors know something that students don’t know about what is best for the students. But, if I don’t know more than my students about what makes a better life, then why am I a teacher?

The Way or The Great Game?

At one level, Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, is a rollicking adventure story of an Irish orphan growing up on the streets of India during the British Raj.

At another level, it is a deep refection on choosing the purpose of your life. It is this second level that makes this book worth reading (and rereading).

One of those Big Questions which I have spent innumerable pleasurable hours talking about with students is: “What should I do with my life?” College is the first time most students have ever really been faced with that question. Through high school, the next step was always obvious for the college-bound student. Get good grades so you can get into college. But, suddenly, the next step isn’t so obvious.

My students often start the conversation imagining that what is puzzling them is which career they should choose. It turns out that everyone has advice for them on the “right” career path.

It is actually quite surprising how many people give advice to others on which career is the right one. For example, these days just about every student has been told by someone, usually multiple someones, that a major in Computer Science is the right choice. Now, knowing many of these students, I can safely say that such advice is beyond awful for most of them. A successful career programming computers requires a very particular (dare I say peculiar?) type of person. Most people would hate such a job.

But, the fact that everyone is perfectly willing to tell a 20 year old what would be a good career path is exactly why the student is so confused. Who is right? Which is the right career?

That is how the conversation starts. That conversation usually lasts under five minutes before I ask some variant of, “What do you want out of life? What is your goal?” And then begins the fascinating conversation.

This is exactly the central question in Kim. Our Hero, nicknamed “Little Friend of All the World,” is a social chameleon; he can blend in anywhere. His parents were Irish, but Kim has been so tanned by spending his days outdoors, he can easily pass as Indian. He is a very clever street urchin.

There are two threads to the plot. First, Kim meets a Tibetan monk, who is looking for the place where Buddha’s arrow landed to create the River in which one bathes to wash away all sin. The quest to find this river is The Way. It is the way to enlightenment, to spiritual fulfillment, to peace and happiness. Kim becomes a disciple of this charming and holy man and joins him on his journey in following The Way.

Meanwhile, Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse-trader who works with the British secret service in spying on the enemies of the land, recruits Kim into The Great Game of espionage. Kim is a natural spy, blending in well with whomever he meets. Kim could become a great spy, indeed, without a doubt, the greatest spy of all. The Great Game is exciting and daring and requires all of Kim’s intelligence and charm and wiles.

And right there is the choice facing my students. Is the goal of life The Way of spiritual fulfillment or The Great Game of an exciting and lucrative career? Kim is exactly like my students:

“Sahibs get little pleasure of travel,” he reflected. “Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kick-ball. It is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi Miriam, and I am a Sahib”—he looked at his boots ruefully. “No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?” He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.

Who is Kim? The disciple of a Tibetan monk who will find joy at the discovery of the sacred river? The student of The Great Game who will blaze a career of such success that people will write books about him?

And, like all Great Books, Kim is really asking: Who are You?

It is no wonder that my students are so tortured with this question of what they want to do with their lives. It is a universal question.

Colleges don’t help students with this question, however. They are also deeply conflicted. The whole idea of an American liberal arts college is that The Way is the object of study. The liberal arts are distinguished from the practical arts, and the colleges and universities were created to help students delve into the mysteries of life and thereby discover their complete selves.

But, in a Faustian bargain, American liberal arts colleges have raised the price tag to $70,000 a year by promising training in The Great Game. They will help the student get that lucrative job.

So, we have a historical curriculum structure grounded in teaching The Way, yet the rhetoric of both the colleges and the instructors is the promise of teaching how to play The Great Game. No wonder college students are confused. If you study literature and history and philosophy and economics and science purely for the career benefits such study will bring, it does not take long to realize that you aren’t getting a lot of career benefits from most of your classes.

Break the pattern. Pick up Kim and read it because it is a fun book wrestling with a deep question and let it take you wherever it will.