You may recall, dear readers, that I suffered this past spring and summer from an eruption of an old malady -- my penchant for daydreaming up alternative futures for myself -- oftentimes, ones so alien to my present that they would constitute the creation of whole new personhoods, whole new lives -- even in the midst of living my own. It is the sort of habit that led me in college, every few months, to declare an increasingly improbable major. Archaeology, linguistics, premed...
Paired with this, however, is a matchless capacity for bailing on each of these alternative futures, at the very first sign that they will require effort that might cut against the grain of my nature and personality. How many courses have I dropped because they required the reading of technical literature? How many books have I put aside at the first blush of an equation?
Invariably, I rediscover that I am fitted by life for a limited range of related activities. Working for a human rights or social justice nonprofit by day. Reading novels and poems by night. Failing to take in information that threatens to exceed the technical or formal capacity of either pursuit. Countless times I have tried something else for half an instant, dropped it, and come racing back to these two passions -- fundamental and undying within me.
Each time, I learn all over again that I am reasonably good at these two activities. This should lead me to double down on them with contentment, with a sigh of blessed relief. And it usually does, for a time. But then, the very success in these two activities leads to the formation of presumptions. If I can do these well, might I not also be able to read technical literatures, learn math, music, physics, and so forth? And the cycle begins over again -- with success leading to hubris, hubris leading to failure, failure leading back into the chastened crawl into the lap of success, and so on again.
I have quoted the passage before, but I will do so again, so beautifully does it encompass this fundamental truth about things -- that life is lived in dreams, of which the present can only ever be a poor reflection -- and so it is the very achievement of our hopes that leads us to abandon those hopes for other, grander ones. I refer to George Eliot's words in Felix Holt:
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.As soon as one of the alternative futures I dream threatens to turn into something like reality, even in its very first instances, it must be abandoned -- strangled in its infancy. And once again it turns out that the true pleasure and purpose of dreaming up alternative selves is the dreaming.
And perhaps sweetest of all, in that case, is the dreaming about the dreaming. I will recall to my dying day the exquisite coziness of certain cold college nights when -- in the library or bed -- I lay there reading -- not a book that was assigned for class, and which therefore would have directly advanced my ostensibly dreamed-of future -- nor even a book that enabled me to dream directly about my ostensible future -- but a book about people who were dreaming about their own ostensible future.
I lay reading on these nights how, in J.P. Donleavy's novel The Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield takes flight from actually studying his law books -- which might in fact make him a lawyer -- to reading business magazines about wealthy lawyers, and dreaming of his future life among them. "[M]y nice fat American business magazine," he croons to it. "No one will ever know what it's done for me in my sad moments. My bible of happiness. Open it up and I'm making sixty three thousand big bucks a year."
Likewise, I read on these same cozy nights in V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, how his protagonist Salim similarly nurses his happiness with reading works of popular science. "I liked reading in my encyclopeadias about things I had read in other encyclopaedias," notes Salim. "This kind of reading wasn't for knowledge; I read to remind myself in an easy and enjoyable way of all the things I didn't know. It was a form of drug; it set me dreaming of some impossible future time when, in the middle of every kind of peace, I would start at the beginning of all subjects and devote my days and nights to study."
Can you imagine, then, the triple ecstasy for the young college student of dreamily reading about Sebastian Dangerfield dreamily reading about an alternative future? Or prodigiously reading about Salim envisioning future prodigies of reading?
The pleasure is magnified geometrically by each order of removal from reality.
That is why I never could get beyond the dreaming. For me, as for Salim, that future time of immersive study in technical and scientific fields has always been an "impossible" one, and every dream of it is eventually abandoned for some other, equally unrealizable one, once I try to put it into practice...
Except that I wouldn't actually have it any other way (and perhaps none of those "quick souls" to which Mary Anne Evans refers would either). For, along the way, I do in fact learn bits and pieces of things about fields that would otherwise be closed to me.
It was one of these improbable by-ways that led me to David Foster Wallace's only -- to my knowledge -- nonfiction book about math, Everything and More: A Complete History of Infinity.
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The specific dream that prompted the reading in this case was the aforementioned one this summer that I was going to do a pre-med post-bacc, and then become a doctor. For some reason.
I knew, as soon as this madness possessed me, that it would eventually pass. I also knew from experience, however, that in order for it to pass, I first had to follow its leadings and promptings and cajolings for some distance, until I had rediscovered all the reasons why I actually hated the kinds of classes you had to take in order to become a doctor -- and abandoned the project and went back to my usual round, mentioned above, of human rights and novel-reading.
So, I decided to treat this wild urge with as much seriousness as I could muster, and started thinking systematically about, if I were to become a doctor, what would be the most serious obstacles to overcome on the way...
It occurred to me that the largest one blocking my path was called Chemistry. In order to finish the post-bacc, I would have to take four whole semesters of it, in both Gen and Organic forms. With lab.
This, of all things, I knew I would hate. Labs in courses are an institution designed perfectly to make use of none of my known skills, and to expose every one of my flaws. The close observation of details. The physical construction of the laboratory set-up, and the manual dexterity required. The management of data and spreadsheets. Nothing in my whole life has suggested I have the slightest capacity for any of this. So how was it to be done?
I was aware that, in my general experience, the easiest way for me to develop an interest in something formerly unfamiliar or loathsome to me has been to study it from an historical perspective. (I suppose this is something like Hermione's decision that it will be interesting to study Muggles, only so long as it is "from a wizarding point of view.")
This historical turn, for whatever reason, has always made virtually any subject interesting to me -- perhaps because of that "orders of unreality" thing described above. When the history of something is studied, you can manage to avoid studying the thing itself, and concentrate only on the dreams people have dreamt about the thing, and you can dream yourself into their lives.
There is a reason I became a history major. It was a way to avoid majoring in any other thing other than the meta-narrative about those other things.
So, my scheme to make myself start liking chemistry was to read the classics in the field. Linus Pauling, e.g. So I started on the first thirty pages or so of him, and actually found it fairly interesting and readable. But only so long as I skipped the equations and problem sets at the end of each chapter.
I realized then that there was a deeper fear at play than the mere fear of chemistry. I realized that the fear of chemistry was but an overlay on top of the true fear -- the fear of math. And this was a fear that would have to be faced and mastered if I was to pass and complete the post-bacc curriculum.
So, I thought, how can I force myself to like math? Again, the answer came: by studying its history. And so I launched myself on the project of reading the classics in the field of mathematics.
These, to my surprise, were incomprehensible to me. Entirely. And I might have devoted a few years, or hours at least, to mastering them, but whenever I thought I might do so, there was human rights or novel-reading to be done, and I prioritized those.
Always, however, when I am in my deepest despair over my failed effort to learn a new technical field, a way forward has opened. Inevitably, it turns out that someone who is a novelist/literary type has already written a book that is accessible to other novelists/literary types, but that is about the technical field in question. This is the holy grail. It allows me to combine obsessions.
The novel/literature-reading must always be given priority, after all. But if one could be reading literature that also taught one about some technical field... oh I quiver with delight at the beauty of the double-vista. I still remember my excitement the day I found out that Tom Wolfe had written a short and easily-read book about linguistics -- however cracked and bamboozling it might turn out to be in its theories. I still tremble with anticipation at the glorious future date at which I will finally get round to reading Goethe's books on plants and his theory of colors -- or Samuel Butler's alternative theories of evolution.
This is what I found, when I saw that David Foster Wallace had written a non-fiction book about math. And when I saw that the Harvard Book Store had a copy of it on its shelves, immediately available for purchase, instantly gratifying my compulsions, I felt that providence indeed was smiling on my venture.
The path before me was clear. I would read David Foster Wallace's book. I would like math as a result. I would become adept at math. I would be able to sail through the post-bacc program, with all its formulae and Avogadro's number and what-not. Then I would become a doctor.
Then, after becoming a doctor, my plan was to go back to reading novels and working for a human rights organization. That is, to do exactly what I do currently. But I figured by that point I would be doing it not as my dull and predictable self, but as a kind of holy ascetic. It sounded divine. Trained healer of bodies -- also with a prior degree in the curing of souls -- now makes it his life goal to mend society. "[W]hat radiant visions of accomplished duties, of ever-increasing usefulness, of beneficent power, of the consciousness of disinterested success!" -- as Lytton Strachey writes about one of Florence Nightingale's gentleman supporters, in his capsule treatment of her in his Eminent Victorians. Such too were my tremulous hopes, and was it really so much to ask?...
By the time I had finished reading the David Foster Wallace book this summer, the dream that had initially prompted it had already faded into oblivion. As I knew it would. Medicine? What on Earth? Obviously, I didn't care about that at all. What I really wanted to be was a lawyer and maybe a politician someday. That was clearly the true dream. To become a Senator. Who cares about doctors?
Since that time, the universe has seemed to taunt me -- trying to arouse regret and nostalgia for the abandoned quest. It is as if everything I read is testing to see whether I have truly hardened my heart against the post-bacc plan, or whether an ember of desire still there burns.
You may recall that in my earlier post on this subject, from September 1, I had written the following: "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." This was part of the appeal.
And no sooner had I made this pronouncement than, a few days later, I read John Updike's novel S. -- about a WASP matron who rebels against her surroundings by joining a desert cult modeled on the Rajneeshees -- and discovered the following affirmation in its pages of that dimly-sensed apprehension of mine. Writes the wry WASP matron narrator, in a letter to her cold, distant, equally Protestant doctor husband: "you are in one of the hallowed professions [i.e., medicine] -- the only hallowed one, actually, since teaching and preaching and lawyering are all known now to be con games."
And how about that "he mended bodies, now he heals the world" fantasy described above? Or the new Senator fantasy I was idly nursing now in its crib (I even started looking into the possibilities of moving to a state with a tiny population, where it seemed like it might not be so hard to be one of the only two inhabitants of it to serve at any given time in this position... Montana? Alaska?)? What could be better calculated to appeal to these fantasies of "accomplished duties, of ever-increasing usefulness" than to read about the doctor-politician protagonist of Josephine Hart's Damage, who is selected by party elders for a Tory seat in Parliament because of his status as a member of one of the "caring professions"?
But no -- neither of these two passages inspired the truly deep longing for the medical degree I had experienced over the summer. Somehow, I had written and read my way -- once again -- out of the obsession. I was standing safely on the other side. And if anything, I was grateful for the tests these authors have provided. They had proved to me that the crisis had truly passed -- this particular compulsion had been laid to rest.
Moreover, as with all the previous obsessions, it had not been a complete waste of time, even if it did not lead to any obvious destination. I had picked up something useful on my way to Nowhere. I didn't become a doctor. I did not finish (or even start) a premed program. But I read an interesting book by David Foster Wallace.
--
And so, that preface concluded, what is actually in this book?
I have taken a long time to come round to this point. Once again, I am amazed at my ability to delay talking about subjects other than myself. I am afraid that on this occasion -- as in times past -- I have exhausted my own and the reader's patience in the exposition of why I read something, before I have gotten round to explaining what it is that I read.
For this reason, this post will have to serve as merely an introduction to the review of Wallace's book -- which will be forthcoming in Part II.
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