Lists

 Back when I was a freshman in high school, I didn't care where I landed on any list. I had no notion of relative rank, order, hierarchy, or prestige. To the extent that I imagined a future for myself, it didn't involve what could be described as a career or a formal education. I knew I'd have to pay for food somehow, but I also knew that whatever said day-job might be, it could not touch my true vocation—that of novelist. I figured I'd pay the bills washing dishes and waiting tables, and then retire to my garret somewhere in noble squalor and spend the night penning works of genius. 

In short, the Paul Auster approach.

"Gucci Bags"

In Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf—a haunting meditation on the nature of evil, penned by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish author in the midst of World War II—there occurs a scene late in the novel when a group of refugees from the surrounding countryside flees a marauding mercenary army, seeking sanctuary behind the walls of the prince's capital city. There, they receive a frosty welcome and eventually the outright hostility of the inhabitants.

After the enemy's army lays siege to the capital, Lagerkvist's narrator recounts how the citizenry begin to blame the refugees for everything that has gone wrong with the war effort. They say the refugees have brought vermin with them, that they caused a food shortage, and ultimately that they triggered the plague that starts to beset the capital, due to the unsanitary siege conditions. 

Happiness Quotient

 For years a friend has been telling me I ought to go to law school, and for years I replied that I was not ready. "But don't you think you could be achieving much more with your life?" he would ask; "Don't you think you're destined for greatness?" "Well yes," I would reply; "but, greatness is best achieved not through radical changes of course and introducing upheavals into one's plans, but through conscientiously doing the best one can at the task immediately before one." 

All of which saw me through several years of my adult professional life without heeding the siren call of a legal education. But there came a point, this fall, when all that suddenly broke down. I felt the need for an upheaval. A new beginning. "You must change your life!" as the poet says. I decided law school needed to happen. And not just eventually, but this year; as soon as possible. But what about my own prior advice to myself? No matter, chuck it out the window!

Anne Hedonia

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall," wrote G.M. Hopkins. Which is true enough. But what he didn't say is that the mind also has plains: long stretches of blank flatness. For these periods of depressing sameness—marked by neither highs nor lows—psychology has given us the apt term "anhedonia." The absence of pleasure. The absence of joy. 

I was feeling that way lately. It was a spell of melancholia connected to restlessness in my job and—who woulda thought?—seems to have been worsened rather than improved by reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Turns out, that is a dangerous novel to pick up when one is in one's early thirties and doesn't know what to do next with one's career. 

Angry Old Men

 Earlier this weekend, a neighbor family set up a live band in their driveway, at the end of our small and narrow dead-end street. They proceeded to blast their well-amplified self-created music straight in the direction of my first-floor accommodations, as I am in the next house up from them on the opposite side facing. The music wasn't bad—actually it was well-performed—but that was not the point.

The point is this assault of beats and chord progressions came at an inconvenient time. I was trying to read and then blog, and I felt that I had not consented ahead of time to this added wrinkle to both plans. I would find myself staring at the blog post, unable to come up with the next line, unable to complete a thought at all, because just as it was coming into being, the next song would start. 

The Means Test

I spent much of the past weekend reading Walter Greenwood's classic working-class novel Love on the Dole—a portrait of proletarian life in England's industrial north during the trough of the Great Depression. The novel depicts the aspirations of young people starting their lives at a time when there is no stable work to be had, and public sympathy is drying up. 

The novel's protagonist, Harry Hardcastle, is lured into life as a factor engineer's apprentice on the assurance that he just needs to complete a seven-year indenture with the firm, then he will be qualified to seek employment as a full-fledged engineer on good wages. Throughout his time as an apprentice, however, he sees warning signs that this promise may be a trap. 

Skin in the Game

 I've talked about this before on this blog, but one of my glaring deficiencies in my current line of work is my lack of what's known as "direct experience." Periodically when opining or giving a presentation on some dimension of immigration or asylum law, I will be asked "what brought you to this work"—and I never have a good answer. I don't have a particularly recent immigration history or experience in my family. I don't have a partner or best friend or immediate family member who has had to navigate that system and seen its flaws. I don't have anything, in short, that could be described as "first-hand experience," apart from what I gleaned after I was already working on these issues in a professional capacity. 

A friend of mine tells me this is precisely why people are suspicious of "white liberals." It's completely unclear why they seem to care or feel passionate about progressive causes, because they have no "skin in the game." Worse, they may actively have an interest in maintaining the existing distribution of power and resources in our society. So why should they be trusted to actually want to change things? Is there some hidden motive beneath the surface? And is the fundamental hypocrisy of their position not the root of all the behaviors people complain about with respect to them: the savior complex, the "holy renunciate" routine, the Jekyll and Hyde pattern whereby an "ally" transforms into an enemy under the wrong conditions?