Show Me Thy Work!

 I will be deep in the mire for the next two months of the ordeal of prepping for the bar exam. It's even more excruciating than people told me it would be. Not because the content isn't interesting—in fact, much of it is fascinating. I always enjoy a good three hours or so each morning—when my brain is fresh and I still allow myself to put down the cups of coffee that I will have to deny myself after lunch—in which I genuinely enjoy immersing myself in the law. 

The misery sets in around one or two PM, when the morning light has faded (and with it the caffeine), and yet it seems that no matter how many bar prep lecture videos I just completed, I am nowhere closer to my goal. Then I face the long sadness of plucking away at a few topics when I no longer have the mental stamina to endure them, while waiting for the next day to come when I can enjoy another blissful three hours of caffeinated peak mental activity. 

When I reach this gully in the afternoon—this pit of sloth and despond—I always tell myself that I'm now so mentally exhausted that I may as well give up for the day and move on to something else. But—here's the real cruelty—the same mental depletion that makes it impossible for me to continue with the bar videos also prevents me from alighting on anything I'd rather do instead. I am incapable of thinking up anything that would make me "happy," in such a state—so I just plod on. 

One of the lecturers in the videos assures me that this is exactly what I ought to be doing. "I know that bar prep is miserable," she says—in so many words. "You're not having fun. Your graduation from law school was a great big anticlimactic nothingburger because it merely rolled over into another task even more painful than the one you just put behind you. But"—she goes on—"the important thing is not to worry about having fun. You won't have fun. So don't expect it. Just do what needs to be done." 

This suddenly seemed to me the only possible advice. It is all too true: I am not having "fun" this summer. But I find myself overwhelmed and exhausted at the thought of trying to think up ways to have fun, on top of having to study for the bar. I couldn't have fun if I tried. So—better far to let happiness go hang. Let happiness take care of itself. I will accept my unhappiness. I will accept the misery of bar prep. I will simply do what I have to do, and not worry about whether I'm happy doing it. 

And that's when the passage from Thomas Carlyle came back to me: the one from his Past and Present. My bar instructor in the video must have been channeling him—whether consciously or otherwise. Among the subjects that Carlyle simply cannot let go of, once a pretext to address them has arisen, are those of work and vocation. And Carlyle, too, advises us: Forget happiness. Happiness won't follow you into the grave. Do what needs to be done, and happiness will see to itself. 

What if we should cease babbling about 'happiness,' and leave it resting on its own basis, as it used to do? Carlyle asks. He goes on: 'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows become Yesterdays; and then there is no question whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another question. [...]

Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence' [...] But our work,--behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, [...] 

What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the wages thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy work!

Yes, fine! I'm on it, Carlyle, sheesh! But can't I wait until morning, when my brain is once again limber? 

In which case, tomorrow morning, another Carlyle passage will come to haunt me—this one from a poem on the same topic (one can see that it was rather an obsession with him): 

So here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away[?]