Infinite Choice

 At some point in my fourteenth year, I had the mixed fortune to be touched—absolutely, incontrovertibly, and for all time—by a sense of vocation. I say it was mixed because it was both benison and curse: blessing, because I knew at last what I was. I was a writer. And not just any kind of writer. An essayist in a particular mid–twentieth century mode. Whatever George Orwell and Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling were, that was me. But it was also a misfortune to discover this, as I say. Because the vocation that was thrust upon me was one that provided no necessary route whatsoever to making a living. 

I knew that this was the case. It was, to be sure, many years later that I would read Paul Auster's memoir of his struggles in early career, but I knew already by instinct the lesson he had to teach: "Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman," he writes in Hand to Mouth. One should not expect to make a living at writing alone, he says. It is not among those practical arts that Thomas Carlyle dubbed the "Bread-Studies." It may be compatible with any number of other means of subsistence; but in itself it does not tell one which to pursue. 

But that decision could wait, since my first step at least was clear. I knew that, if nothing else, one ought to go to college; and so I was able to devote my energies to that goal, for the remainder of high school, with single-minded zeal. But, as soon as I was admitted and enrolled, the whole cosmos of infinite choice opened before me again. Becoming a "public intellectual" and essayist in the Orwell mode may have required college (although, in truth, Orwell himself never made it beyond secondary school—but that school happened to be Eton)... but it provided no guidance whatsoever as to what one should study there. 

Of course, one might argue that, logically, a writer should study literature. But I knew that was by no means essential. And indeed, there was a kind of pride in studying something wholly unrelated to one's true craft and vocation—the better to prove that the craft had chosen you, and that you had no need of formal and external tuition in the schools of the world. Indeed, one didn't even have to finish college, so long as one started it. The cult of the drop-out is now associated more with the tech world, but it began much earlier in the arts, I declare, before Silicon Valley was ever heard of. 

Was I making all this up? I admit, I have no idea where exactly I heard about it; it wasn't laid out for me explicitly anyplace that I can recall. But I found it articulated more recently in an essay by Sandra Tsing Loh—proving to my satisfaction that my high school self hadn't simply hallucinated these unwritten rules of the writing life. Speaking in 2009 of the cool creative types of her Los Angeles literary milieu—a tribe including everyone from NPR commentators to Hollywood screenwriters—Loh observed a "hierarchy of coolness" with respect to how one related to one's college. She placed: "dropp[ing] out of prestigious college" in the #1 slot. 

As for Sandra Tsing Loh herself, she did basically the ideal thing, according to my rules: she went to CalTech and studied physics, then became a performance artist playing a piano on a freeway; proving better than anyone that one's choice of major could and maybe even should have no bearing whatsoever on one's true career, one's real artistic ambitions. 

I knew therefore in college that my choice of major, as well as my selection of Bread-Study beyond that, could be literally anything, without fear of it touching my true unchanging kernel of authorial selfhood. And for about a month in my freshman year, this open-endedness seemed liberating and exciting. 

But, by about another month after that, it had become an unspeakable burden. How was I to choose? The problem was not at all that I didn't want to do anything. The problem was entirely that I wanted to do everything. There seemed not a single kind of life that couldn't be grist for my mill. The problem was my incapacity to live more than one of them. 

The urgency of this dilemma eventually abated. At some point in my college career, I reached a deadline for choosing a major, and I ended up with the one that had been my original choice at the start, before taking my many divagations into other fields. But I had only settled this point in time to face the next great existential abyss of infinite choice: the entire cosmos of possible career paths after graduation. I had to pick one, so I settled on a particular masters degree. Then, at the end of that program, the abyss confronted me again. I chose again. By sheer necessity, my life fitted itself link by link into a single timeline among the innumerable branching options. 

After a certain amount of this, I thought maybe I had outgrown the dilemma. By this point, I had a Bread-Study, after all; which is to say, more humbly, a job. But, this past year, the same old "can't-pick-a-major" tendencies beset me again; this time, it was because I had to select a law school. 

The problem, as always, was not a dearth of options, but a surplus. Each school seemed desirable in itself, if only I didn't have to foreclose all the others by choosing it: so excited would I get about a given offer, indeed, that I had to regulate my intake of information about the school, for fear I might be unable to control myself any longer, and, in a burst of exhilaration, would close the deal too early and submit my seat deposits before weighing all the other possibilities.  

An example of my method in action: talking to a friend about the Midwestern public university that had long-since become the front-runner for me, I described the place, and he started to see the appeal when he contemplated the natural surroundings. "You'd get to experience the Prairies, I suppose," he said; "the Great Plains..." "Exactly!" I told him. "And there's the whole tradition of the Prairie Lawyer," I added, "like Abraham Lincoln. And there's the whole tradition of the Prairie Radical, like John P. Altgeld. And there's the whole tradition of the Prairie Radical Lawyer, like Edgar Lee Masters and Clarence Darrow." 

My friend complimented me on my "ability to come up with narratives and to find ancestors for myself." Alas, though—it is a dangerous talent! For I could do the same for just about any law school in any part of the country. The Deep South? Surely that's an odd choice. But then again, there's Atticus Finch and Morris Dees! The mountain West? This was the site of one of the more long-shot selections of the schools to which I applied. Another friend scoffed when I told him I was looking as far afield as Idaho. "Why would you even apply? You don't want to go there," he asserted.

Au contraire. Among the infinite possible futures that seemed both possible and desirable, one at least featured me becoming a great crusading populist leader in that Rockie Mountain state, or perhaps in Nebraska. I could get inspired by the idea of trying to "scourge the elephant plutocrats/With barbed wire from the Platte," as Vachel Lindsay sang, and some part of my soul at least prayed that I would be denied admission at all my more plausible choices of law school so that I might find myself accepting an offer there... 

My past week has been spent on a road trip across the country, in which I am officially visiting some of these law schools, but which at a spiritual level has a more exotic itinerary: it is an effort to try out, to sample, the various possible selves and futures each school presents before committing irrevocably—as I must finally do—to only one of them. As part of this endeavor, I stopped over in Virginia the past week, to visit one of the schools in the consideration set and taste of the vision of myself as a tidewater attorney. In order to get into the spirit of the place, I brought along a novel by John Barth set principally on the Chesapeake: The Sot-Weed Factor. 

What I wasn't expecting was that the novel would prove such an astute commentary on the very problem I confronted: the dilemma of infinite choice. That is to say, the novel proved more a meta-study of the reasons for my journey itself than a deciding factor in my choice of law school. Ebenezer Cooke, the book's protagonist, was—I discovered—a sufferer of the same malady I have been trying to describe above. The most salient passage occurs early in its pages. Ebenezer declares, at the outset of his own voyagings: 

[I]t were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads [...] none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Bookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together.

Indeed, indeed! Aye, Ebenezer, there is the rub! But I take counsel from the experience of my college-age self who, let us recall, after sampling every major in the catalogue eventually settled on exactly the one he had intended to pursue from the start. More often than not, in the face of an apparent infinitude of possibilities, one discovers that the choice had actually already been made long since. And, if every option really is as desirable—or at least, as defensible—as any other, then one might as well go and do that thing. 

Let us heed, at last, the wisdom of Samuel Butler, whose advice has served me well in the past: "If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognise as reasonable," he declares, "they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take."