Sunbeams

 When some friends visited me over the weekend, it soon occurred to us it was the first time we all had chatted since some recent major changes in my professional life. They were excited about my decision to follow their own recently-trod path into law school and had many questions about the journey ahead: what classes would I take in my first semester? What would I choose for my 1L summer internship? Had I been assigned to a section yet? 

Attempting to answer, I realized just how little thought I had given to any of these subjects. It was easy enough to look up the schedule for first year classes; I just hadn't done so. I should have some sort of plan for my summer vacations; but I didn't. And I had no idea what a section was. To be honest, the whole subject had scarcely occupied my thoughts this summer. I knew I was going to law school; but I had built no castles in the air; I had no bold daydreams of the adventure ahead. 

Part of this is simply the bathos that comes with the fulfillment of any long-held desire. Some of what magnifies the desirability of anything we don't currently have, of course, is the sense of its scarcity, hence of its preciousness. Once we have it, however, it no longer seems so scarce; so is it really so desirable? Coupled with this is a human tendency toward self-depreciation: if someone like us is permitted to have it, can it really be so hard to obtain after all? 

Another aspect of it in my case, however, was the late date at which this long-contemplated step was being taken. In the ten years since I graduated college, I had seriously contemplated applying to law school many thousands of times. 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...

I think about how thrilled my younger self would have felt to be standing in my shoes, and I worry I have been ungrateful. I tell myself that I would gladly give it all up to the younger me if that were an option. But from my current vantage point, the fantasies have lost some of their power to thrill. I'm not looking to define myself professionally all over again. I'm not looking for a new career path that will resolve with finality the problem of finding a self. 

And I am all too aware at this stage of my life that anything that lawyers do—even or perhaps especially the most idealistic—still has to be concretized in the form of a job. I know now—as I did not in my early twenties—what a job is. I've learned that a job even doing work you believe in is still a job. And that working with other people comes with many of the same complications regardless of the industry in which one works or the beliefs that motivate one's peers. 

Bringing any fantasy to fruition is of course to taint it with mundane reality. I was reading recently the 19th century novel Effi Briest, by the German realist Theodor Fontane, and my heart ached—as it did over many passages in this unadorned but tragic tale—when the ambitious civil servant Innstetten finally obtains the ministerial appointment he had sought throughout his career. He concludes at last that the victory is hollow and the prize unworthy of the contest.

He calls to mind an anecdote he had heard about another careerist in the Prussian bureaucracy who had waited all his life for a medal from the Kaiser, only to cast it aside in rage and disgust when it finally arrived. This prompts the reflection from Innstetten that "[e]verything that is meant to give us pleasure is bound to time and circumstance, and what delights us today is worthless tomorrow." (Rorrison/Chambers trans.) 

In his short book about Proust, Edmund White tells a similar anecdote of the great novelist's mature years. After seeking a publisher without avail for years, his manuscript was finally approved for print; but by then Proust was in the midst of personal grief and unable to take any joy in the prospect. As White summarizes the lesson of the episode: "If Proust's law is that you always get what you want when you no longer want it, then publication exemplified this tragic principle[.]"

Is it exclusively a tragedy though? It may be tragic in the classical sense that it cuts human pretensions down to size. But perhaps it's actually a better spirit in which to begin any venture. Daydreams, after all—being immaterial—make for very poor sustenance. They are not usually enough to get one through any difficult experience. And a fantasy—any vision of glory—is bound to be disappointed in practice, so better not even to be nursing one on the threshold of a new voyage. 

In any chapter of my life requiring work and effort, what ultimately kept me going was not the fantasy of myself and the person I might be if I persist. It was the claims that the experience itself placed upon me from one moment to the next. First do this, then that. Each step generates its sequel, and the project creates its own rights and entitlements to one's time as it goes. This, more than any yearnings after vanishing phantasms, is what actually sustains any human effort that endures for a lifetime, or at least for a career.

I agree therefore with one other author's words on the folly of chasing after dreams, these ones from Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. The passage occurs, admittedly, while the protagonist is ignominiously trying to fob off a romantic partner in whom he has lost interest; but it encapsulates nonetheless a truth of human life—one thematically on-point for Fitzgerald's novel, and vouchsafed as well by Buddhist tradition:

Desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone[.]

So shall it be with law school. Alas. But perhaps no one should enroll in something like 1L Torts still expecting it to glitter. The reason to do it is not that it will impart any lasting halo to oneself or sheen to the reality of life: but that it might enable one to be of greater use to others.