When she was in the 8th grade, my older sister used to make a habit of explaining her math homework to me each night while she worked through it. The practice served us both: she (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, grew up to become a teacher) has always found the best way to learn something was to teach it to another (years later, when she was in college, we again discovered that she would infinitely rather explain to me what her BA thesis was about than write it down before an empty room and send it off into the void).
And I, for my part, delighted in the thought that despite being only ten at the time, I was nevertheless learning "advanced math." I marveled at the apparent complexity of the exotic algebraic contraptions we studied, such as the quadratic formula (a device I settled on for the rest of that year as a kind of personal coat of arms). I took to writing these formulae down each night on post-it notes as talismans. The string of letters and symbols, which I ill-comprehended, seemed to have a romantic aspect akin to the writing on the glass in the Princeton library windows in A Beautiful Mind.
So intense was my fascination with the romance of "8th grade math" when I was a 5th grader, I fear, that by the time I actually got to 8th grade, I was an abysmal math student. Why? Well, for one thing, I had shifted over into a new mania by then—my ill-starred (and short-lived) "cool phase." But more fundamentally, I had exhausted the potential interest of the subject too early, by dreaming so much about it in advance. And even after my high school shift back to intellectual pursuits, I never really cared about math again. The magic was gone. I had spoiled it irrevocably by gobbling up all the romance too soon, when I was still in elementary school.
Something similar has been happening to me with law school. People keep telling me that I must be so thrilled: I'm finally "living my dreams," they say. And they're right, in a sense. I did dream about law school back in the day. During my last years of college, the thought of becoming a crusading lawyer figured prominently in my daydreams as one of the potential outlets for the inchoate but seething passion and indignation I felt within me—the feelings that came upon me when listening to emotionally-powerful music, for instance, often prompted visualizations of the attorney as hero.
This was the era in which I read Clarence Darrow and the accounts of his biographers. There was a man with a gift for self-mythologization to match my inward yearnings. Soon after came the era in which I watched Bill Kunstler documentaries. Here was a lawyer who could issue inspiring summons to future social justice attorneys while quoting T.S. Eliot. It seemed clear to me from their examples that the law could be a vehicle for the expression of something—some passionate need to protest and defend, in a manner in keeping with the spirit of poetry and chivalry—for which I could see no outlet in an academic career or any of the other possibilities I was then considering.
A decade later, I am actually getting the degree I dreamed about so fervently those years ago. But I fear that my career as an actual law student is proving to be a bit like a repeat of my career as an actual 8th grade math student. Now that it is really happening, the romance is hard to find. The topic feels exhausted. It is one thing to be 5th grader learning "8th grade math" or a college student dreaming of the law. It is quite another, and altogether more prosaic thing, to be an 8th grader studying 8th grade math, or a 33 year-old taking torts, contracts, property, civil procedure, and all the rest of them.
I foresaw something of this dilemma last summer, when I was preparing to return to school. A friend had told me eagerly how excited I must feel about the prospective adventure. I wrote on this blog that, in truth, I was struggling to summon the enthusiasm. The problem, I mused, was that "I had seriously contemplated applying to law school many thousands of times" before then. "I had pursued in imagination every possible way it might unfold. I had lived a hundred attorney's lives from start to finish in my mind: I had completed the Clarence Darrow fantasy, the Bill Kunstler fantasy, the Bryan Stevenson fantasy..."
In short, I had pulled an "8th grade math" again. I had obsessed so thoroughly about something and dreamed it so many times over that I had ultimately denuded it of its romance. I had sucked its magic dry. Perhaps everything that can be accomplished in life has only a certain amount of talismanic power; and if one dreams about it for too long, too intensely, one can deplete it entirely before one has even had the chance to live it through in actuality.
I was reading this week that great 19th century Russian novel of disillusionment, A Hero of Our Time, and I find our author, Lermontov, offers there a more succinct and potent description of the phenomenon I belabored in my earlier post, from last summer, and which I am trying to describe again here. Lermontov's Byronic protagonist, Pechorin—one of the more intriguing people in literature—feels, as I did in college and subsequently, a surfeit of bubbling passion and inchoate yearning. "I must have been born for some lofty destiny," he relates (in Pasternak Slater's translation) "since I am conscious of boundless powers within my soul[.]"
The problem for Pechorin—as for me—as for so many of us—is that he used up these powers in imagination, without ever finding a suitable outlet for them in reality. He relates in a subsequent passage (or perhaps it is an unnamed narrator speaking who inwardly resembles Pechorin—it is one of the ambiguities of Lermontov's text that we are not entirely sure who relates the novel's final tale—regardless, we hear Pechorin's soul in these words) that as a child he was a "dreamer" given much to imagining the future. As a result, he exhausted the topic, just as I did with 8th grade math, and—possibly—with law school.
"[W]hat's left of all that?" asked the narrator, speaking of his childhood dreaming. "Nothing but fatigue, as if one had just spent a night fighting phantoms [....] Those futile battles drained my soul of its ardour and my will of its steadfastness, qualities which are needed in real life. I entered life having already lived through it in my mind, and became bored and disgusted like one who reads a poor imitation of a book he has long known."
"Entered life having already lived through it in my mind"—that's just it. That's my problem. I entered law school, as I wrote last summer, having already "lived a hundred attorney's lives from start to finish in my mind" (and that was written long before I got around to reading Lermontov's book). And the real thing can only feel like a paltry simulacrum—just as actual 8th grade math, once I had the chance to take it for real, could only feel like "a poor imitation of a book [I] had long known." It could not compare to the romance I had conjured up in my mind of "advanced math," with its plethora of mysteries and inscrutable symbols.
Is there any solution to this disillusionment? Or is one simply condemned to wander the earth like Pechorin, sticking around—as he puts it—merely "out of [...] curiosity, hoping for something new," and being disappointed every time? Is this simply the inevitable curse of the overly-imaginative? The mind races ahead and outstrips the pace of reality, such that the latter, when it arrives, can only ever seem like a tiresome late arrival, who shows up to the party and demands one's time and attention just as one's energy is starting to sag and everyone else is getting their coats?
As George Eliot described the dilemma, in a beloved passage I've quoted more than once on this blog: "Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success."
And if this is indeed the fate of the imaginative, is it perhaps for the best? Is romance a poor basis on which to navigate reality? Are dreams a too-insubstantial food to last one through something as labor-intensive as law school, and so is one well served perhaps by exhausting them early? I know I for one may have lost the inchoate passions and yearnings I associated with the prospect of law school a decade ago. But even if I had gone to law school right then, I might have found that the romance would clash with my surroundings, and that my yearnings would have found little real outlet in the daily round of torts, contracts, etc.
Whereas now, dreamless, I attend these classes, and few inchoate yearnings are stirred within me by their content. But I do—to my pleasure and relief—have another thought that crosses my mind, as I sit there in class: "Ooh!... this is... kind of interesting!" A less passionate but, I suspect, more sustainable basis on which to found a career in law.
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