Cold Calls Revisited

 Well, it happened. It comes for us all eventually. You can't say I wasn't warned. Today it came for me. The bad cold call. 

Of course, everyone listening to me strain and fumble for a response knows it could just as well have happened to them. Every one is sitting there thinking: "there but for the grace of God..." 

But that is much less consoling in practice than one might have hoped. The very fact that people can see themselves in one's place gives one a taint of misfortune. One has the sense (almost certainly a projection) that people are averting their eyes when one passes. Don't bring that bad luck over here! Or perhaps they are simply filled with the discomfort of pity and don't know what to say. 

Or, more likely, they aren't thinking about it at all. There is the time dilation effect of cold calls, after all, in which the eternity that one groped for some adequate words seemed to one's classmates like a mere instant or two, as if they were traveling near light speed somewhere far out in the galaxy, while oneself was trapped on Earth. Or, even if they noticed it, they don't care. They say: "Not me!"

No, the punishment of the cold call only really stems from what one experiences inwardly. The professor doesn't care. One's classmates don't care. Only you care. Thus, if one could convince oneself that the cold call didn't matter, then it wouldn't. 

Knowing that one's own feelings are the problem, though, is rarely enough to overcome those feelings. One still aches, inside. One still hurts. Why did it have to happen to me? 

The only thing that relieves the feeling is how quickly everything moves on. There is always another class period just starting; always another casebook reading to complete. As I put it to a friend the other day: "every day in law school has little humiliations and horrors/redeemed only by the fact that the next one will certainly be coming so soon after/that it is impossible to dwell on each for long." 

In other words, there is a constant rising and falling in law school, something like the fortunes of 19th century families. One is up one instant and down the next; and the only thing that one can trust with certainty is that whatever one is feeling right now will not last for long. The next emotional episode, good or bad, is already on its way. 

I suppose the best one can do, then, is to take a kind of stern pleasure in the sheer wildness of it, and one's ability to weather it. One can strap oneself in and say: "bring on the oscillations!" In Strindberg's preface to Miss Julie, the playwright declares: "this alternate rising and falling is one of life's great pleasures" and that the "joy of life" is to be found "in its cruel and powerful struggles." (Robinson trans.)

It is something like this intuition perhaps that leads old lawyers to look back fondly to, and repeat to one another as war stories, the times they were raked over the coals in law school. What good would the risings be, if they were not balanced precariously against, and took not their power from the contrast with, the ever-looming specter of the fall?