The Goats

 Sitting for the Florida bar exam the last two days, they had us herded each morning into long, theme park–style waiting lines on opposite ends of a conference center—as we piled into a single vast, cavernous chamber to take the test. Beholding the sea of people in snaking lines before me, I found myself once again obsessing over my chances of passing—as I'm sure everyone else there was as well. 

The most maddening thing about the bar exam is that your odds depend entirely on the curve. So—it's not a question of how well you did, but of how well (or poorly) everyone else did. If you feel confident on part of the test, a nagging voice says: "but maybe that was easy for everyone, so it does you no good." And if you feel miserable about part, a mean-spirited voice hopes: "but maybe everyone else did worse." 

Looking at the people arrayed in their many rows, I could only think: I just have to be better than about 35% of them. Surely that's not so hard, right? Surely, the odds are in my favor. Surely, I will be among the 65% that is chosen. 

And it occurred to me that this is probably what all the goats tell themselves on the day of judgement. And suddenly, in our two long lines of test-takers, snaking upstairs into the vast hall in columns on the right-hand side and the left, I felt that we were going to meet our eternal verdict. 

"Those on my right, ye shall be admitted into legal practice. Ye on my left—depart unto the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."

And it seemed to me inevitable in that moment that I was doomed to be one of the goats. And that was fitting. The story of my life in my twenties had been, by my humble standards, a string of successes (or at least, near-misses). The story of my thirties, by contrast—at least, ever since I'd gone to law school—was proving to be a series of abject humiliations. Why would this not be yet another one? 

I think this is good for me. It's breaking my hybris. It's my just punishment for thinking that I could be a person in the world like other people; that I could work in a normal profession for pay rather than chasing ethical or philosophical chimeras. 

I often remind myself that Gustave Flaubert flunked out of the legal profession. 

Here was a person who is celebrated now as one of the artistic geniuses of the nineteenth century. But we would do well to recall Sartre's term for him: "the family idiot." Which was no doubt how his own siblings and parents saw him—since he had made such a bungle of his abortive legal education, and had then run home to the family's apron-strings, invoking illness as an excuse to hide from the world. 

Abject humiliation is good for the life of the artist—as of the saint. It proves to one all over again that one does not belong to the world. That, like Baudelaire's albatross, the penalty of having wings with which to soar in the empyrean is that one makes an absurd, waddling spectacle of oneself whenever one tries to use one's feet—a fit subject only for the japes and mockery of others. 

Or maybe—they could retire the curve. Maybe they could make passage of the bar contingent on some absolute standard of one's understanding of the law, rather than a relative standard of succeeding through the failures of others. 

But of course—that is typical goat-logic. This is the way the predestined goats always think. I've had the same question about theology all my life too. "Why couldn't just everyone be saved?" As Byron put it—that great advocate for the goats—

’Tis blasphemous; I know 

    one may be damned

For hoping no one else may e’er be so;