Full Many a Flower

 At some point in one's thirties, one starts to look around oneself and realize that one is no longer in some stage preliminary to life, but in life itself. Whatever life is, this is it. One is no longer advancing through a series of initiations meant to prepare one for existence; this is whatever one was being prepared for. And a great many of us look around at our lives at just that moment and think:... but... I'm not famous yet. I'm not yet great. How can this be my real life, when I'm not important in this life? 

A friend and I, both confronting this mid-thirties crisis, realized that we had always somehow assumed we would be famous by this point in life. It seemed inevitable; self-evident that we were bound for some form of greatness. Maybe everyone feels this way. On the one hand, we know that for every one person who "makes it big," there must be millions who do not. But we always assume we will be one of the lucky ones. We will be in the column of the fortune few, not the column of the millions. 

It's hard not to feel this way since, as Thomas Hardy once put it, "we are ourselves." Which is to say, we are the exclusive center of our own consciousness: so how could we not regard our fate as being of special significance? As Wittgenstein demonstrated in the Tractatus, the universe that each of us knows begins and ends with ourselves. The "metaphysical subject" contains all we know or can ever know. Thus, he wrote, solipsism is true, in a sense—it's just not saying much that isn't obvious.

But, as Wittgenstein also says, the limited sense in which solipsism is true (or at least, unavoidable) does not mean that the world is what we want it to be. It does not conform to our wishes, just because it is us. As he writes in the Tractatus (which I just revisited by the way—it's fresh on my mind): "The world is independent of my will." And so, as much as we might have reason to feel that, as Hardy puts it, "there must be a special future in store for us," this doesn't actually make it true. 

It is in fact quite possible for someone to live and die unknown. It is even possible for oneself to be one of these unknown ones. As Thomas Gray laments the fate of the unread poet (in what has ironically become one of the most famous poems in the English language, cementing the poet's immortality): "full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air." One might be such an unseen flower. One might prove to be a "mute inglorious Milton," rather than a Milton. 

A few nights ago, I watched a 2013 documentary by the Safdie brothers, which explored the fate of one such unseen flower: Lenny Cooke, a former high school basketball star who, in his teenage years, was widely expected to become the best player of his generation, but who—a decade later—had never played in the NBA, let alone become a household name. Here was someone born to be a Milton, but who had become a mute inglorious Milton—a desert flower rather than a potted plant. 

The film can be viewed as tragedy; and it must produce a wince of recognition in anyone who imagines themselves to be a person of unfulfilled potential. Indeed, the Safdies did well to pick (or rather—have thrust upon them, for they were merely editing and adding to footage that a previous director had earlier shot) a one-time sports hero as their subject. Sports have, after all, always been the best metaphor in American life for our obsession with success and fear of failure in general. 

Think of Death of a Salesman—it is the fact that Biff was once a high school quarterback that leads his father to entertain such exorbitant dreams of his eventual success. And the Safdies know more than enough about sports, and the passions they arouse, to tell a story convincingly about them. The same feeling for the emotions of basketball contests, which animated their film Uncut Gems, appears here. But whereas that film featured a Milton, Kevin Garnett, this one features an almost-Milton. 

"Look in my face," as the poem by Rossetti goes; "my name is Might-have-been." Such is how one could choose to regard Lenny Cooke's fate. But of course, his odds were never actually that good. As one coach explains early in the film, it is literally one in a million players that will make it to the NBA. Does that mean that the 999,999 others did not lead valuable lives? Such could not be said of Cooke, who—a decade later—is a loving father who makes a decent living as a motivational speaker. 

William Gaddis wrote a great deal about the fear of failure in American life. He thought that Rocky had become the perfect symbol of our culture because, significantly, the most famous boxer in movies doesn't actually win the fight. He thereby symbolizes what Gaddis called "the rush for second place." What was important, Gaddis concluded—and the line appears in several places in his different novels and writings—is not to avoid failure—but rather "to fail at something worthwhile."

That is the true ideal of life. For, as a Gaddis character says in A Frolic of His Own, "the worst thing that can happen to a man is to fail at something wasn't worth doing in the first place simply because that's where the money was[.]" Indeed. Better to be an unseen flower, then, than a luxuriously overgrown weed; better to be an inglorious Milton than a vainglorious silvertongue. Better to be a loving father than an unloving celebrity. There are worse fates by far, that is to say, than that of Lenny Cooke.