Cold Calls

 In the lead-up to law school, as people learned I was planning to attend, everyone had something to say about "cold calls." A memorable scene from 1973's The Paper Chase shows the young protagonist caught mortifyingly unprepared to answer a question in class, and rushing off to the bathroom immediately afterward to vomit in anxiety. Lawyers would regale me with anecdotes from their law school days about embarrassing or particularly memorable times a professor stumped them. And probably an actual majority of our orientation week, as we were readying ourselves to finally begin, was spent listening to various people—everyone from professors to the dean to 2Ls and 3Ls—tell us "not to worry so much about cold calls."

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at all this. The Paper Chase kid? What a whiner! Boo hoo. What, had he never been called on in undergrad? What's the problem? All the lawyers telling us what a terrifying yet formative experience it was to be put on the spot during a 1L doctrinal class—how could it possibly be as big of a deal as they said? Hadn't they ever done public speaking before? I assumed the problem was simply that they had started law school so relatively young. Once you've been, like me, inured to the workforce for several years—I was telling myself—a professor asking you a question can hardly be the most terrifying thing you've ever endured, in the scope of life's challenges. 

Or those 2Ls and 3Ls telling us fifteen thousand times "not to worry so much about cold calls..." I was sure they were making it out to be worse than it was. By spending a full week before we'd even had an actual class listening to people tell us that cold calls "aren't as bad as you think," it even began to feel like a conscious effort to psyche us out. After all, I hadn't thought they would be bad at all. I was not in fact worried about them. All the endless advice not to be worried managed to do, therefore, was to implant the first seed of fear that maybe I should be. But no, I told myself. At the end of the day, the professors are human beings. The questions they ask have answers to them. Just do the reading and otherwise prepare for class, and you'll be fine, I assumed. 

Then the first session of Contracts convened. The professor picked out a student at random and asked him to summarize the facts of the case before us. The student responded satisfactorily. Okay, I thought, it is possible to survive that. Then the professor refused to move off from that student, even after getting a respectable answer. He asked about the procedural history of the case, which took place in New Hampshire in the 1920s. He asked about the meaning of the legal terms involved, such as a finding of "non-suit," which we were apparently supposed to have taken the initiative to look up on our own. I wasn't even the one being called on, and already my stomach was clenching up and turning over. I began eyeing the exits and trashcans, making a plan for what I would do if my stomach rebelled against me in the manner of The Paper Chase. 

 I get it, I realized. I understood what all those people were warning and reminiscing about. The fear is real. It took me a moment though to figure out exactly what made this so frightening. Had I not spoken in front of a classroom, or a congregation, or a work meeting innumerable times before? Was I not equally as well prepared to address the subject matter as any other student in the room? 

Yes, but... I think what distinguishes the law school cold call as particularly terrifying is the realization that there is no certain way to protect oneself from humiliation. I had thought that if I just did the reading and knew the case I could sail through the questions without injury. But the professor's line of questioning put all this in doubt. I realized that the questions that could potentially be thrown our way were framed at such a microcosmic level of specificity that it was impossible to foresee and guard against every one. There was no way to cover oneself at every flank and close off every hole in one's intellectual armor. The darts could still reach one somewhere, no matter how many times one read the case.

And if humiliation is impossible perfectly to protect against, and could come at any moment, then it is virtually inevitable that, in the course of a whole semester, it will at some point be inflicted upon you. And therein lies the terror of it. 

If the humiliation and mortification are inevitable, then what is to be done? I found myself remembering back to the advice that all those law professors, deans, 2Ls and 3Ls tried to give us, before I was willing to listen to or believe them. They had told us not to worry. But why? Clearly, it turned out, we had good grounds to worry. 

Well, I remembered that they hadn't promised us we would never have a humiliating cold call, that we would never be faced with a question to which we fumbled for an answer. To the contrary, the humiliation, they seemed to agree, truly is inescapable. Rather, they said that we just have to bear in mind that no one else cares about the fact that we were humiliated. Every professor at orientation attested to this. They said: "we don't remember who we call on, or what they say." Every student said the same thing: they never remember a single other student's embarrassing cold calls; they only remember their own. No one else, they concluded, is ever paying as much attention to you as you are to yourself. 

The insight, I then realized, is the same one with which I girded myself for embarrassing social interactions in law school—long before cold calls were even on my list of worries. I wrote on this blog about this very topic just a few weeks ago, contemplating the start of law school, and cited to myself the helpful words of Thomas Hardy. 

In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, when contemplating the social mortification of Tess among her peers, at the discovery that she is an unwed mother, Hardy observes that she should have heeded the law students' and law professors' advice. Her position might be humiliating, in the context of a society bound by the stigmas and taboos of Victorian morality. But the fact that she was being humiliated and stigmatized existed in no one's mind but her own—at least not for very long. And since what we are worried about, when we worry about social humiliation, is precisely the opinion and thoughts of others, this reminder that they do not in fact care about us or dwell for any length of time on our status can be both liberating and redeeming. Hardy writes: 

"[W]hat had bowed [Tess's] head so profoundly—the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought."

In Hardy's first published novel, Desperate Remedies, one finds the same thought in the mouth of the protagonist Cytherea—except here, the realization is given a tragic valence. Cytherea emphasizes the sadness inherent in the fact that we exist to each other only as "passing thoughts" (as Tess puts it) and that it is only to ourselves that we are sustained and all-important existences. Other people, Cytherea observes, enter into her own unique consciousness only in the fleeting manner she enters into theirs—that is, "only as the thought I seem to them to be." The upshot of the realization is that "Nobody can enter into another’s nature truly," as Cytheria puts it; "that’s what is so grievous."

As we have seen, however, this inaccessibility of each of us to one another—the fact that, at last, we matter to ourselves far more than we do to anyone else, and that our own sense of outraged dignity and mortification belongs only to us, even though it is founded upon the assumption of the judgment and contempt of others, and therefore collapses as soon as we realize that those others do not care one way or the other about it—is not exclusively "grievous." It is also freeing. This very tragic circumstance that Cytherea emphasizes so piteously is in fact a great balm to social anxiety. 

Let the humiliation come, therefore, and—when we have realized that no one else noticed it or gave a damn about it—we discover that it was in fact no humiliation at all. Such is the sum of the law students' advice, at any rate, and it is probably the best one can offer under the circumstances (however much it may be cold comfort). And so, professor, ask away! Just try not to remember my name.