Success

 I was watching Brian De Palma's excellent Hitchcockian thriller Sisters (1972) the other night. The movie perhaps goes off the rails a bit in the final quarter, but I greatly enjoyed the first fifty minutes or so. What I especially liked was that there was a plucky left-wing journalist character in whom I could project an idealized version of myself. Here was a character who, by my lights, had the perfect life. The walls of her apartment are covered with clippings from the ornery opinion columns she has written, criticizing the local police force and corrupt politicians. She writes these pieces for a local paper in Staten Island which, despite being local, is nonetheless apparently able to pay her a living wage. 

And I thought: isn't it so typical of the era that this character is portrayed as frustrated in her career and ambitions, in spite of her apparently idyllic existence. People back then didn't realize how good they had it. They had no idea how fortunate they were that such things as local media still existed; that journalism as a middle-class career was still viable; and that the worst thing that could happen to you if you entered it, back then, was that you might struggle for a time in your twenties on the profession's lowest rungs, before scoring a big scoop. Working for merely local media was seen as the worst-case scenario. Not to me! If I had such a life, I told myself, I'd be sure to appreciate it. 

But then it occurred to me that I basically did lead that life—and that I still managed to complain about it and not appreciate it fully. After all, my job for several years was to write blogs and op-eds for a human rights advocacy group about various political issues. If most publications still ran print copies instead of keeping everything online, I could paper my walls with opinion columns I'd written as well (hell, maybe I will—there are such things as PDF exports). Yet I eventually left that job because I too assumed I was destined for greater things. Maybe, then, the problem with people under-appreciating things is not exclusive to the 1970s. Maybe, it has something to do with human nature. 

I was thinking about this in part because I was reading Leonard Gardner's spare yet heartbreaking novel, Fat City—an acknowledged classic, beloved especially of aspiring writers across the nation. It is indeed something close to the perfect American novel. It is hard-boiled, noirish, and existential all at once, putting one in mind of a cross somehow between Camus and Bukowski. It manages to tell the horrible truth without ever dwelling too long on the point. This is what gave the novel—to me at least—its strange power. The book can pack more stoical despair into three lines than more overtly maudlin writers could express in a lifetime. And some of these passages seemed eerily on-point to my life. 

One of these pithy observations appears early in the novel, when a character is surveying his boxing career. Seeing photos of himself when he was still in fighting condition, he reflects: "That period had been the peak of his life, though he had not realized it then. It had gone by without time for reflection, ending while he was still thinking things were going to get better. He had not realized the ability and local fame he had then was all he was going to have." Chilling thoughts! But not necessarily untrue. Perhaps that's what De Palma's journalist should have known, before it was too late: this is as good as it gets. Perhaps that's what I should have realized, before I left my job. 

It seems to me that this is the great danger of a small-scale success—of "local fame," as Gardner calls it. Perhaps some people quit their jobs because they are failing at them, but I suspect even more of us quit because we succeed at them. We acquire hubris from doing too well in our small field. We think: clearly, I'm selling myself short; I'm destined for the big leagues. And so we leave. And it doesn't occur to us until too late that perhaps we succeeded in the small field we left behind because it is the best one for us. Perhaps De Palma's journalist was destined to write op-eds for the local paper; she does it well. Perhaps I was destined to write blogs and op-eds for a nonprofit. 

And so I come back around, looking for what I had too eagerly cast aside before. I say—forget this law school nonsense. I renounce it! Just let me write blogs again! But Gardner's novel suggests an even more disturbing possibility than having to backtrack in life to recover what was lost. His characters find that maybe, even after learning their mistake, there is still no going back. One character after another in the book encounters this same reality. They discover they made a mistake; but they can't correct it. They pine for a lost lover or missed opportunity. Yet, when they go to look for it, they find it is not still open. Someone else has come by and scooped it up. 

And so, we may be left staring into the same specter that Rossetti confronted, in one of his poems: "Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been./ I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell!" That may be the tragic and hopeless truth. Perhaps there is no solution to it. Perhaps "Truth will not be comforted," as a character cries in a moment of tragic revelation, in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. 

Or: maybe not. Maybe I can just go get another job. After all, I'm only thirty-four.