Spite of everything, that is to say, my finger was still inches away from registering for courses in, yes, the premed post-bacc program.
Why on Earth would I do so? What strange new moral malady was this, to want suddenly -- in my twenty-eighth year -- to take another crack at all the labs and problem sets and stoichiometry that I had only just narrowly escaped in the course of my formal education? No sooner -- hardly -- had I emerged spluttering from the burning lake of such sulphuric acids in my high school years, than I was preparing to plunge into them again?
With all the curious lucidity of madness, I was actually able -- even in that moment -- to assess these apparent paradoxes rationally.
All the obvious reasons were in play, I knew. There was the fact that becoming a medical doctor is still one of the few achievements that is widely regarded in our society as a sure sign of "success." Doctors are quite possibly the only profession I can think of that are not treated with ridicule or contempt by large segments of the community for one reason or another (hatred and resentment, maybe, but that's a different thing).
Which is not to say so much that I am thirsting for more wealth and power -- I'm not craving "success" in that sense. No, the course of my ambitions have always taken a more roundabout form than that. What I longed for was a way to make my renunciation of wealth and power more complete and convincing. "Being a doctor, he could do anything, yet he chooses to work for human rights!" That was the idea. That was what people were supposed to say, regarding me. "Being a humanities major, of course he works for human rights," does not sound the same note of heroic asceticism.
The doctor in Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity -- who is talented enough to cure the rich but maintains instead a working class practice; A.J. Cronin, who heals the diseases of the miners; the imprisoned Communist doctors in Kertész's Fatelessness, who cling to their conscience even in captivity; a doctor I knew as a teenager who was one of the few people in my small world at the time to openly declare themselves a socialist -- not to mention the still more obvious: the Paul Farmers, the Charlie Clements -- these were the ideal in mind.
Never mind that between me and this shimmering mirage was a veritable desert of organic compounds, lipids, proteins, and the minor problems of fluid dynamics -- in none of which had I ever showed the least interest before. This too was a positive attraction! Deep within me, forgotten for a decade, was still my twelve-year-old self who declared to everyone that he was going to become a scientist when he grew up (an astrophysicist, to be specific, because this was -- as I told people at the time -- "the hardest.")
This self had been retired for years in favor of other poses, but suppose after all it turned out that that one was the true one, the destiny to which I was meant one day to return? (Sure, the reason I had given up on this self in middle and high school was at least partly due to the fact that science proved to be a very different thing in practice from what it was at the level of daydreaming, where I supposed it would be a sort of vague philosophical wrestling with recondite concepts, rather than a lot of math, but shhh!).
Also, in spite of the human rights-related fantasy above; in spite of everything I thought I knew about myself -- there was also the desire to beat a spiritual retreat from politics and the news. The thought that maybe there was some field of mental effort in which I could immerse myself for a time which could not by any path of logic lead back to a person whose name starts with "T" and ends up "rump." (This is not actually possible, of course. You can't talk science without eventually talking climate, to name the most obvious example.)
Beyond all of these obvious reasons, however, something else nearly pushed me over the edge. It was the strong and crucial factor of sheer perversity -- that which Poe bid us to consider as one of the fundamental elements governing the will -- an "imp" transcending anything that could be analyzed under the rubric of rational self-preservation.
The greatest reason of all why I suddenly wanted to become a doctor, that is to say, was that it was almost certainly the one thing that I could not do. Of all possible futures still available to me, this was perhaps the one most definitely and obviously closed.
Why, oh why, was my heart not equally set on law school, or a humanities PhD, or one of the other professions to which my training and interests and disposition and professional experience more obviously pointed? Well, because, my friend, those are in fact things I might plausibly do, and their very achievability robs them of the sharpest, most passionate, most pang-inducing sort of desirability. It is this element of possible-ness that deprives them of the quality of true Freudian wish-fulfillment.
"We all want things we can't have," says Miranda, in John Fowles' The Collector. "Being a decent human being is accepting that." Yes, but scratch that second part! None of your Viennese reality principle intruding here! Freud got to be a doctor, so is it really so much to ask?
There is a passage in Huysmans's A Rebours when the protagonist is considering where he is to build his solitary retreat from modern society. He decides to place it where he will still be within traveling distance of Paris by train, rather than truly in some remote and inaccessible region. Why? "For, since a man has only to know he cannot get to a certain spot to be seized with a desire to go there, by not entirely barring the way back he was guarding against any hankering after human society, any nostalgic regrets." (Baldick trans.)
Ah, just so! If only I had not foreclosed and renounced all science and math so loudly in my teenage and college years, I might not now be smarting to return to them.
The nature of the quarter-life crisis I described in that Biswas post earlier this summer -- mentioned above -- is that it is simply a crisis of mortality. We discover that regardless of what else we may have done with our lives, no matter what we have achieved, we have not in fact done everything. There are realms of accomplishment that will inevitably remain inaccessible to us, simply because we cannot live forever. "Because you can't do it again," says Zuckerman in Roth's The Human Stain. "You can't be twenty again. It's not going to come back." Nothing can bring back the hour, the poet says.
However many lives you've lived, you will not have lived them all -- thus, you will still respond-- still recognize yourself -- in one of the most haunting passages from A House for Mr. Biswas:
Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which [...] he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future become only visions of [his son's] future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted. [...] He sank into despair as into the void which, in his imagining, had always stood for the life he had yet to live....
Unless, ha ha! all of that is not in fact true -- perhaps that notion is merely a relic of outmoded mores and old-fashioned ideas from the days when social roles were more prescribed and medical technology not so far advanced toward the prolongation of human life! Perhaps, in 2018, it is possible to do everything, and it is merely my lack of drive and initiative that has prevented me thus far from doing so. Perhaps everyone else is already doing everything and I am the one who is being left behind!
Hence the dreadful restlessness. Hence the mercurial chasing after hobbies and interests that marks the mid-life crisis (or quarter-life crisis, as the case may be) -- my friend Seanan and I suddenly deciding to take up martial arts two summers ago, e.g., and other kindred pursuits that are born in a night to perish in a night.
***
All of this came to me as rather a surprise, as I'm sure it does to most. Two times in my life, I have wanted something so badly that I was convinced, if I could only possibly get it, that I would never ask for anything again. I would renounce all claims of the universe. The first was when I wanted to be admitted to the University of Chicago. The second was when I wanted to be selected for my current job. (Nothing related to divinity school or ministry ever filled me with this same extreme longing -- which probably indicates that the nature of my true interests and calling does not point in that direction).
After the first of these two wishes came true, I was thrilled. For about a day. Then, the panic started setting in -- what if for some reason I got terrible grades in my final semester, and they withdraw the admission? Under the impetus of this fear, I actually ended up with the best grades of my high school career that semester.
Sometime later in the summer after high school graduation, I recall observing to my parents: You know, I always thought that getting into college would solve all of my problems. But now I'm just worried about the next thing that could go wrong.
I thought this was a striking and original observation. However universal our experiences of life, we are always convinced on some level that we are the very first to go through them.
Once I got to college, I confess, I was even troubled once or twice by thoughts of whether other colleges might in fact be better. I was quick to stamp out these ill flickerings of unfaith, however.
After the second of the two wishes came true, I similarly foreswore all other claims to happiness. I recall in the week before I started full-time, but after I had been accepted for the position, I wrote a blog post for the organization that was well-received, then got behind the wheel of my car to head home. On the way, I listened over and over again to Crosby Stills Nash and Young's "Our House." Life used to be so hard, now everything is easy.... the song goes.
Seldom has there been a more perfect melding of lyrics and inward experience. Yes, I thought, that's just how I feel! So what if the song as written is about romance, and in my mind it was about finally being offered the chance to write a blog post denouncing Trump's travel ban? I can't help the way I'm made.
Once again, this happiness was short-lived. It was soon replaced by fear at the possibility that I might somehow lose the job once obtained. That they might decide it was all a mistake and that I needed to depart at once.
The fact that there was a built-in six month probationary period before permanent status and full union membership were conferred seemed to be designed with my mentality in mind. It gave me something definite to fixate my anxieties upon -- a new date on which I could concentrate all my hopes and fears. Okay, I thought, Now I just need to get through this deadline, then I will truly be free and happy.
Once again, this fear gave me super powers of concentration and devotion. I recall in the first or second week staying until roughly 8 o'clock at night to finish a 12-page strategy paper, and nearly setting off the alarm when I left. When I told this to an older and wiser colleague the next day, she said: "everyone does that when they start here. Eventually they realize that's not sustainable."
Maybe not for everyone else, I thought. But who said I would be like them? Surely I will never change. I will remain humble and grateful, ever ready to push myself to new extravagances of service to the cause. My philosophy at the time was rather like that of Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant: "I was secretly shocked to see [...] the senseless and implacable hatred that workers feel for their employers. This hostility was something to which I never grew accustomed. In my whole life, the only relationships with individuals [...] that I took seriously were those that I managed to establish with the people for whom I worked. They paid me and this raised them higher in my esteem than any amount of praise and protestation of affection ever could."
It's not the money. Still less the money's amount. It's what the money means, of whatever quantity. It meant that something I would almost certainly be doing anyways -- writing blog posts denouncing Trump's travel ban -- was now being publicly recognized as valuable in some sense -- so valuable as to be worth conferring upon me some measure of society's most basic metric of value. My blogs were worth legal tender!
In pushing myself to the limits of my capacity for being a good worker, the only limitation was recognizing that I needed not to take it so far that it became burdensome or off-putting to others. In those early weeks and months, I would have gladly worked every weekend and evening, if I wasn't aware that such Stakhanovism was looked down upon by my fellow-toilers as reflecting poorly on the collective. And in my employers' eyes, I didn't want to be Bartleby the Scrivener. You'll recall that in Melville's novella there's a moment when the narrator suddenly switches from admiring Bartleby's diligence to realizing and becoming creeped out by the fact that he's got nothing else going on. "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
The trick was to remain passably human while also being a model employee. This I managed to pull off for a good long while, and therefore assumed it would last forever. "I don't ever want to become one of the surly entitled ones!" I told my sister at the time. (Over the course of our lives, there are a great many things I have told my sister that I will "never" do or become that I eventually in fact do.)
My sister replied, "I'm already past that stage. Nowadays at work I'm like, 'None of you can ever get rid of me!'"
The nature of the psychic process of becoming entitled is fairly simple. It has to do with the remarkable human capacity for believing that all ill fortune is underserved, whereas good fortune is due purely to our own merits.
Before I was admitted to college or got this job, I felt that neither would ever come my way, so once they did, I thought that I had only narrowly escaped. Phew! I had got in beneath the castle gate just before it clamped shut. "It's one of these lucky things in my life which I just squeaked through," Naipaul is quoted as saying in Patrick French's The World is What it Is, speaking of his scholarship to Oxford, which was awarded as a special favor after he had first been turned down.
That was very much my attitude to my admission to the University of Chicago. Surely some mistake had been made, and it was only a matter of time before I was found out.
(Naipaul knows all about the psychological dynamics at play in this post -- not only in Mr. Biswas, but in his later work as well. In A Bend in the River, he describes a fantasy recognizable to anyone discontented with their humanistic education and all it had wrought, regretting the brevity and irrevocability of life's shortness, contemplating a mid-career pivot to the sciences. The narrator notes, speaking of reading "a magazine of popular science," "I liked receiving these little bits of knowledge; and I often thought, while I read, that the particular science or field I was reading about was the thing to which I should have given my days and nights [...] making something of myself, using all my faculties.")
After enough time has passed that the idea of being a U of C student was fully assimilated into my identity, however, it no longer seemed alien to my original destiny -- a lucky and unexpected break. Instead, it became who I was. Of course I would have gotten in.
And if it's so obvious that I would have gotten in there, might I not have gotten in somewhere else, if I had tried? Somewhere even more esteemed?
So it is with the job. So it is with every success. Before we have it, we promise that if it will only be granted to us, our gratitude will be undying. As soon as we have it, we start to take it for a matter of course, and we wonder to what else we might be entitled.
There is a moment in Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel, when the narrator acknowledges to himself that -- in his savage obsessiveness -- he may have placed impossible demands on his relationship with the novel's Maria. He confesses that he should have rested content with having been in a relationship with her at all, and not demanded endless proofs of her love. This leads him to an intriguing observation about the nature of incremental entitlement:
He visto en los últimos años emigrados que llegaban con la humildad de quien ha escapado a los campos de concentración, aceptar cualquier cosa para vivir y alegremente desempeñar los trabajos más humillantes; pero es bastante extraño que a un hombre no le bastante con haber escapado a la torture y a la muerte para vivir contento; en cuanto empieza a adquirir nueva seguridad, el orgullo, la vanidad y la soberbia, que al parecer habían sido aniquilados para siempre, comienzan a reaparecer[...]And perhaps, as Sabato hints, some such entitlement is warranted. We should not live forever in a state of servile gratitude. My pride too, after obtaining the college and job I sought, after humbling itself in meekness, eventually began to reassert itself.
Nor -- as I have argued before -- is there anything wrong with a quest after the infinite; with a refusal to be satisfied and instead to channel one's energies into the pursuit of goals which can be approached but never attained. Indeed, this may well be the secret to human happiness.
What seems to me less healthy about my present predicament -- my itchy finger poised over the keyboard, ready to register for Gen Chem, of all unholy things -- is this desire not only to progress further, which any living human mind will be striving to do -- but the desire to start over at the beginning and move in some wholly unfamiliar field and course of life.
Especially when what one is currently doing is something one admires, right? -- something one thinks is a good thing, an important thing to do. How could I, of all people, become restless in a job where I get to advance human rights -- in part at least through the use of the pen? Who else would pay me to write blog posts denouncing Trump's travel ban? What could have been more "up my alley"? What could be more me?
It's partly just that any position in life -- no matter how well suited to oneself -- becomes dull if one doesn't know where to go with it next. As Naipaul says, writing of Mohun Biswas's return to his newspaper job -- a career the details of which had once -- early in his career -- delighted him -- "his enthusiasm, unsupported by ambition, faded."
What is to be done? There seem to be a few possible ways to recover one's sense of passion and gratitude for one's job, if not servility.
One is to be reminded of the fact that the job is not vouchsafed one to all eternity. It is still possible to lose it. Mr. Biswas, in the midst of his more entitled phase at his newspaper job, talks a big game about how he might leave his job at some point. Periodically he asks his son to call in sick for him, not even bothering to place the call himself. "But," Naipaul observes, "he was careful to space out these days."
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel The Householder, describes the efforts of her protagonist, Prem, to ask for a raise at work. Entitled in his job as a teacher, he focuses all his energy on earning a higher salary because he does not think to question that his current one might ever be withheld from him. (Most of the novel is taken up with his efforts to introduce this topic into conversation with various people in authority, only to be distracted or interrupted at the critical moment.)
When he antagonizes another teacher who tattles to the Principle on him, however, he suddenly rediscovers his gratitude and his servility. "He knew that" -- writes Jhabvala -- "whatever it might cost him, he had to hold on to his job. He had to do everything, accept everything, for the sake of holding on to his job."
Okay, but is there some way to rekindle the passion and the gratitude, other than abject fear of poverty, rejection, and failure? Particularly for work that -- again -- one regards as interesting and valuable?
Isn't there some other way to rediscover a love for one's job, that is grounded in some positive hope rather than some negative avoidance? Every last piddle of idealism in me insists it much be so.
I suppose the trick is partly a matter of replenishing one's stock of fantasies about what the future in one's current field might hold -- visions potent enough, that is, to rival the doctor/renunciate fantasy described above. I wish human rights organizations had been around longer, so that more famous novels had been written about them. (Heroic lawyer novels -- like Carson McCullers' Clock Without Hands, with its lost and shadowy father-figure/lawyer-hero who is described only in flashback -- have some overlap with this proposed genre and its themes -- but they fuel the desire to chuck everything and go to law school, which also doesn't help with the present difficulty.)
It's also, though, about recovering one's courage and energy for the political fight that human rights work entails. Premedical studies may sound an odd choice for a form of escapism, but they are that, in the face of a job that otherwise compels every working hour to be spent in contemplation of the ghastliness of the Oval Office's current occupant. At some point, I discovered I had reached an inner limit of my capacity to do the latter that I didn't realize I had. I no longer listen to NPR in the morning or on my ride to work, for instance, but instead turn on podcasts featuring Ken Jennings as often as possible.
Perhaps the answer, then -- instead of pondering the unappeasable self and what might make it "happy" -- is to ask what might be useful to others. Will I be much good to humanity as a doctor? Nothing about me has ever suggested that I would. Might I do some good as the employee of a non-profit who writes blog posts (among other things, I swear)? A great deal of the evidence thus far points in that direction.
This is essentially the advice Gandhi offers, in his great talisman, which I once taped to my dorm room wall and -- like all good advice -- neglected until I had exhausted all the alternatives. "Whenever the self becomes too much with you," Gandhi says, "apply the following test." He bids us to think of someone who is suffering most in the world. "Ask yourself if the step you contemplate will be of any use to him. Will it restore him to control over his own life and destiny?"
...
Oh dear, but that just gets me thinking about Paul Farmer again. And now we're back where I started.
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