Off the ladder

 A friend of mine was recapping the other day a conversation he'd heard at second hand with a current Yale Law student. Someone asked this student if they thought graduating first in your class from Harvard Law School was a distinguished accomplishment. "No," the Yale student said; "because all the people at Harvard Law are just Yale's reject pile anyways."

Being told of this interchange, I felt a perverse twinge of pleasure deep within me, at the thought that the institution I had chosen for my own legal education was in such a different league altogether from both these schools that I had effectively exited the race. No one from Yale or Harvard would look down their nose at me, since I was so far below their line of sight. Indeed—for perverse reasons I still struggle to explain to myself—I hadn't even applied to either school, during my own law school admissions process. "I guess I just... opted out," I told my friend. 

Most of the significant choices of my adult life have been horizontal leaps of this sort off the side of the relevant career ladder—irrational plunges, inexplicable "opt-outs" that I've never been able to explain by anything other than instinct. At the end of college, for instance, I contemplated a host of more logical professional degrees, then ended up applying to divinity school. At the end of three years of a theological education, I then took several steps toward applying for PhD programs, then suddenly bolted away from the process in order to take a part-time job in a church and another part-time internship in a nonprofit. 

For the most part, these lunges into the outer darkness worked out for me in the end. Divinity school, far from being a mistake, led by a most unforeseen and roundabout path to a series of jobs I loved. My nonprofit internship turned into a seven-plus-year career in human rights—the field I'd always most longed to enter. And above all, I got to spend the otherwise unrelievedly bitter years of the Trump administration helping to lead the organized resistance to his most inhumane policies. 

Each time I try this sort of horizontal leap into the abyss, however, I always have the fear that this time may have been the mistake. This time, I might just keep falling. I recognize, after all, that there is something unreasonable and self-destructive in my instinct to step off the ladder—something (albeit in a more modest and less dangerous capacity) like Simone Weil's impulse to hurl herself into a low-wage factory job in order to understand the plight of the proletariat; or George Orwell's inclination to contract tuberculosis. 

The way to idealize and excuse my tendency, of course, would be to portray it as a heroic willingness to sacrifice worldly gain in order to be true to a vision of myself. Such a course of action is, after all, much preached (if seldom practiced) in our society, which—for all it is often condemned as materialistic—is actually much more a product of nineteenth century Romantic individualism. And this tradition of thought would have understood very well the overriding imperatives of the Self. 

As much as I find consolation in such a narrative, however, the truth is that the anecdotal evidence in its favor is by no means strong. One wishes mightily to believe in the myth of the True Self; but the doubt always intrudes: is not much of the subjective experience of the self actually just the product of necessity, environment, and circumstance? Could one then have done just as well or better by staying on the ladder? Would one not have learned with time to accept the ladder; even to love it?

The moment in which one first dangles one's foot off the ladder, leaps, and feels the air rushing by one are of course immensely freeing. One senses a great joy of liberation. What relief! This is why we tell so many stories of people making such choices to opt out, and repeat them with such relish. The person who stands up in a meeting, say, and quits on the spot. "Uncle Jeff and his office can plum go to hell," as a character in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer says, after turning down his relative's offer of a stable but controlled life. "They can all go plumb to hell."

The trouble though, is that this momentary relief may not be enough to build the rest of one's life on. One can wander around for a day, after telling one's uncle off and saying that he and his tempting job can "plumb go to hell," feeling very brave—but pretty soon the doubts creep up your spine. After all, a leap off the ladder lasts barely a second. A lifetime lasts about three score years and ten—which is an awful lot of time to fill up, if one has nothing to do with it but recount the details of one's momentary act of heroism. 

Dos Passos's great 1925 novel is an excellent book for thirty-something ladder-jumpers to read. It is a young person's book, to be sure: but I mean an old young person, or perhaps better to say the till-recently young. It is the sort of book that is wise enough and lingers with its characters for long enough to appreciate fully the liberation that comes from a young person's decision to "opt out" and jump off the ladder, but also to recognize that it does not solve their problems. And in fact, they may live to regret it. 

Dos Passos's character Jimmy—probably the closest thing to the author stand-in in the novel—is the one mentioned above who turns down his uncle's job offer in order to live a hand-to-mouth existence as a cub reporter on a city newspaper, and to dabble on the side in such bohemian pursuits as the arts and early psychoanalysis. In all of these ways, he is the ladder-jumper par excellence. He has done the brave thing. He was been true to his True Self, in the finest Romantic individualist tradition. 

But is he happier for it, as the tradition insists he should be? He is not. He compares himself unfavorably to the members of his family who chose the opposite path: the ones who never left the ladder, and indeed would never dream of leaving it. "You ought to see my cousin James Merivale," he says. "Has done everything he was told all his life and flourished like a green bay tree... The perfect wise virgin." In other words, maybe the True Self can do just fine on the ladder after all. The True Self, if confined there, would learn to shut up and get used to it. 

Anyone who's reached their thirties has started—like Jimmy—to know friends and relatives and former classmates who have grown up to be James Merivales in their own right. People in leafy-green suburbs with two kids and a golden retriever and a well-paying professional job—people, in short, who obeyed precisely the prescribed path and were richly rewarded for it. Was their True Self stifled in the process, as Romanticism would have us believe; or does the self form as an effect, rather than a cause, of our experiences and choices, and therefore will always adapt to whatever one lays before it? 

So too, is my sense and Jimmy's sense that we don't belong on the ladder—that we simply couldn't accommodate ourselves to its rigidity—really a product of our innate characteristics? Or is it that we forged a sense of self after having jumped off the ladder? Thus, if we had stayed on it and kept climbing, perhaps we would have found that it suited us just fine? We would have become James Merivales too, and flourished like green bay trees? 

Dos Passos himself, of course, leapt off the ladder. So did John Fowles. Most artists and writers had to, in order to do what they do. Thus, in Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, we find again the heroic portrayal of the decision to "opt out." Here, it is the main character's father-in-law who takes him to the top of the mountain and shows him the world's kingdoms at his feet. He offers to pass on his immense industrial fortune to the protagonist, Charles, if the latter will agree to help manage the business. 

Charles meditates on the matter all evening and wanders the streets of London having a dark night of the soul. At last, he concludes that he would rather sacrifice his life prospects than disgrace himself by "going into trade." An absurd and feeble gesture, surely, yet Fowles—Charles's creator—helps us perceive the beauty implicit in the act. Any willingness to sacrifice oneself on the altar of an ideal, Fowles suggests—even one that is little more than a snobbery—appeals to the poetic soul. 

Writes Fowles: "There was one noble element in [Charles's] rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient purpose in life. [....] All who have insight and education have automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil. [...] You have just made some decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession, has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles's state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for what he is: a man struggling to overcome history."

"Foolish; but never evil"—I can accept that as a verdict on my own tendency to leap off the ladder. And I flatter myself even that my gesture possesses some of the futile nobility and tragicomic beauty of Charles's refusal of a world-empire-sized industrial fortune out of a foppish disdain for having to work for a living.

Is this what is left, then, of Romantic individualism? Of the True Self? Yes: I can accept that. They are mere myths, like the nineteenth century Gentleman. But a willingness to sacrifice oneself for a myth, if genuine and carried to the point where the sacrifice actually stings, can nonetheless attain a sort of chivalric beauty. 

I can't say that it makes me happier, per se. This is the part of the myth of the True Self, perhaps, that does not survive the test of experience. It is the aspect of the myth that Jimmy was implicitly rejecting when he compared himself to his cousin James—the latter never once placed the True Self higher than the world's opinion or social propriety, Jimmy observes, and look at him: he's happy as a clam! 

But there may be a sort of person who chooses the leap off the ladder even knowing that it will not make them happier. Even with both eyes open, with both feet dangling, knowing full well what the costs and penalties will be of losing one's grip; even then, they still plunge. Why? Because they have chosen to set something higher than happiness. What is it? Someone like Dos Passos or Fowles could point to the creation of works of genius as the higher goal; of them it can be said that it was to one day bear these fruit that they chose exile.

In my own case, this defense feels like it would be promising too much. I don't know if I am incubating any works of genius or bearing any other artistic fruit that only flourish in harsh climes. Such a rare bird may not be gestating inside me during my period of wandering. But there are other, humbler things I may have chosen to place above happiness on my list of goals nonetheless: something like, the goal of living with passion. Feeling the gut rage and roar within me, and knowing that it might long since have gone silent if I had not taken the leap. 

And so here I go—stepping off into the dark, wind whipping past my ears—and I am reminded of a poem I wrote back in the summer of 2016, after another one of my plunges off the ladder (this one made at the end of divinity school):

One wonders if it is not

After all so easy

To tuck in the shirt and find the mate

And birth the baby and bring up the child

And have the large family and build the large house

And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors

[I was asking in this passage, in so many words: might I not have stayed on the ladder, and been a James Merivale myself, and been perfectly happy with it?]

And maybe it is, [I went on] but one knows the while

One would not do it if one could (and

Can); one recalls

A legend among some

Apologists (and anthropologists)

That the damned in fact desire

Their fate

Indeed they practically

Pray for it

And though one does not believe it, it seems

In one’s own case quite convincing.