Obsessions

I have always been obsessive. This blog should testify to that claim if it conveys nothing else. For most of my childhood, however, my obsessiveness continually ran up against a problem: the vehicles I selected for it were too small. There's only so far you can go with an interest in, say, the quadratic formula. First thing you can do is you can write it. After that, however, there isn't much else apart from writing it again (which I did, many a time). As a result, I frequently exhausted my chosen obsessions, and was forced to move on to fresh ones. 

At some point toward the beginning of high school, however, I at last settled on two subjects that seemed capacious enough to permit me never to get to the bottom of them: literature and politics (more specifically, political morality, by which I mean those aspects of politics that do not require math, or anything other than a humanistic education). You may think I have violated the obsessives' rules already by choosing two topics—isn't that cheating?—but you must understand that for me the two formed one continuous entity. 

It is by no means obvious where I got this notion that politics and literature should both be investigated by the same sort of person—an "intellectual"—who was to be defined circularly as a person who was interested in literature and politics (specifically of the left-wing variety). For all that these assumptions were wholly self-evident to my teenage mind, they bear no relation to the actual sociology of knowledge in the country I grew up in, where intellectual work is generally far more specialized and parceled out than that. The "academic" could provide me no model of what I was after. 

The origin of my definition might therefore have had to remain a mystery, if Tom Wolfe had not explained it to me. As he observes in one of his essays collected in The Pump House Gang, this concept of the public intellectual takes its origin from the literary journals of Regency England, for whom it was a given that the two topics to be discussed were books and the French Revolution (yay or nay). Why these two topics in particular? Because they were the ones that could be understood by the great "educated reading public" of the era—the gentleman amateur with no practical knowledge or technical skill. 

This description hints already at the danger of exhaustion lurking within the apparently limitless field of literature and political morality. I did not suspect this trap, however, when I was starting out on my life's journey. From my teenage years through my mid-twenties, I uncomplainingly set about the task of emulating Hazlitt and his Regency peers, as well as their twentieth century epigoni—Trilling and Dwight Macdonald and the like. My mold was set. Existence was to be a round of reading, synthesizing, and writing up what one read and synthesized, and that seemed enough to fill a life. 

But suppose, as in any folktale, I was drawn inexorably to that which had been enjoined. Suppose that precisely because I had decreed for myself so early on that my realm was to be that of the gentleman amateur and no other, not that of the specialist or the technician, that inevitably the forbidden domain would start to exert a certain dread fascination. Suppose I started to wish that the practical and technical and active vocations had not been foreclosed by my choices. 

This, as I have tried to explain before on this blog, is more or less precisely what took place around my twenty-seventh year. The "quarter-life crisis" began.

This was not, let me emphasize, born of an attempt to disown the obsessions that came before. It was more an extension of their success. Seeing the amount of work and words that could be generated by a single obsession, I began to wonder what would have happened in my life if I had applied this same level of devotion to other subjects—ones that carried a bit more, well, worldly esteem in a society that is largely organized around the production of new technologies and the attempted solution of practical difficulties (at least in terms of the material rewards it gives out). 

I started to hunger, like Byron, for the active life of the practical person—to tire of the "gloomy vanity of drawing from the self," as he called it, with which literature is fundamentally concerned. I fancied myself a Rimbaud—he who, after his world-shakingly prodigious career as a teenage poet, suddenly gave it all up to move to Africa and go into business. In Edmund White's telling, Rimbaud's reading in this curiously non-literary portion of his life (one of the few nearly complete self-re-inventions on the part of a one-time writer in recorded history) shifted entirely to the pursuit of practical lore—mining, hydraulics, astronomy and the like. I longed to do something similar. 

Before I could make my Rimbaud-esque mid-career pivot to becoming a software designer, medical doctor, or some other technical master of a domain in which I had never previously evidenced the slightest interest or skill, the only thing that remained was to close up shop where I was. I needed to settle my affairs with literary and moral knowledge so that I left them in a good shape, or at least until I had read enough in these fields to tide me over while I took a break to study... I don't know, chemistry, or whatever it was I had in mind. 

I therefore bought myself a book by Linus Pauling, another on coding, etc., and said I would take those up as soon as I had settled accounts with the humanities. 

How it went from there is perhaps how it went with Rimbaud as well (who never did become known to history as a great engineer, after all). I would read a novel. It would suggest another novel that had to be read—either by force of analogy or because it generated interest in the author's other words. Or it would lead me to feel I needed to read a biography of its creator. Covering one gap in the hull of my literary knowledge only seemed to make others more visible. I needed to fill those too—then I could finally get around to that Linus Pauling. 

I never did. Linus Pauling remains unread on my shelf, while the "shilling lives" of Rimbaud and Byron—to take two examples—do not. The gloomy vanity of the self continues to call me back, even as I try to escape from it. 

The lesson here is obviously one of limits. One should count oneself fortunate for having even one life's work—why should I expect another? I have been blessed with a sense of inward direction with regard to literature and politics and I ought to simply double down on them. But then I think: why, if these two are my life's work, do I feel a need for something else? Isn't this a rather strange relationship to have with one's "passions," with one's "interests," with one's life's work—to be forever trying to escape it?

It turns out, no—it is not so unusual. Or at the very least, it is not unique. 

I was struck recently by a passage in Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?—quite possibly the only novel ever written about Richard Nixon's hypothetical football career he never had. Nixon, in the book, is a kind of parody of the excesses of obsession. If the real-life Nixon learned how to mimic the human responses necessary to succeed in politics by a kind of mechanical rote-memorization, Coover suggests, then this alternative history version of the president applies the same method to succeed in love and sports. Lacking any natural aptitude for the playing field, he nonetheless becomes a legendary footballer through repeating the same plays over and over again. 

Because circumstances on the field—as in life—are almost infinitely various, however, Nixon quickly loses himself in trying to memorize a play for ever possible vagary that might come his way. He loses the time for anything else, as a result—his whole life becomes consumed with repeating drills over and over again, with each new one suggesting others to be learned and memorized in turn. 

In case we did not grasp the analogy to artistic obsession and craftsmanship in this, Coover's narrator makes it explicit: "one skill did not simply lead to another — more often it led to a dozen, and each of these dozen to a dozen each, multiplying like leaves on a fast-branching tree. I could understand his dilemma. I have the same problem with my sculpting: I can never hope to catch up." Elsewhere, this same narrator remarks: "my sculpting is not something that was added to an expanding life, but that which remains after all the other things have been peeled away, things that, who knows, I might have been better at. We all have too few lives to live."

So, then, this sense of resentment toward one's own obsessions is not perhaps unheard-of. Perhaps this is how we all feel toward the infinitely-ramifying subjects that we find we can never get to the bottom of, no matter how hard we try, and that therefore end up equipping us—in spite of ourselves—with a task big enough to fill a career and a life. If the crisis of my mid-to-late twenties had to do with entertaining the possibility of other lives, other careers, the period after the crisis is what comes when one accepts that these possibilities have indeed been "peeled away" (as Coover writes). Rimbaud may have felt that being merely a poet was too few lives for him. But poetry is what he had to give the world, and that for which he will be remembered. 

And so I come to accept that one life may be too few—but on the other hand, it is more than none. I do have a life's work on which I have been launched—one which, as Coover puts it, will forever outpace me. And thank heavens for that, since if I caught up to it, then it would be done. The story would be over. 

It may be true that I - like all of us - have lost chances for other lives along the way, other things I "might have been better at" (though also very well might not have been). I'm not going to become a doctor or an engineer—not so much for reasons of time (there's always that post-Bacc option) as because of the more insurmountable barrier that I don't find what they do very interesting. Those life trajectories have been "peeled away," and literature and politics is, for me, "that which remains." So let's get back to work.