Wrestling with failure 2, Undying fame

When I finally replied to D’s second letter about her failures as a teacher, I think I answered pretty obliquely. What I mean is that I picked up one theme ... I hope it was as central as I felt at the time ... and ran with it. What resulted was almost less a letter, though, than an essay on its own. She has not answered it directly yet, so I can only hope that she found some relevance in it.

Meanwhile, I think it is safe to say this essay reveals far more of my own faults than I would normally be comfortable with. But hell, this is a blog, right? Isn't that what blogs are for?

I've been thinking about your depression, but I am having trouble articulating something to say. I think I understand what you are talking about, because at some deep level I think I am familiar with the very same feelings: the details of our circumstances are different, but the substance or content of this particular depression is something I think we can each at least partly recognize in the other.

It all revolves -- on one axis, at least -- around this concept of "greatness". You would like to be a great educator. Well, of course you would. I've got that. I understand it completely. When I left graduate school, I spent a lot of time wrestling with the same desire, the same anxiety -- I was afraid that I was giving up my only chance at greatness, at undying fame. It is an intoxicating image. To know you can't have it is very depressing. Now, of course nobody ever promised me that I would actually achieve anything glorious if I stayed in school, still less that it would truly be a good thing to want. But the emotions don't take account of those contrary possibilities, do they? The emotions show us a golden, sunlit vista over there somewhere and then say, "But not for you." It can be terrible.

When this cloud has settled on me since then, I have spent a lot of effort thinking about the difference between the great and the good. Greatness is a goal that has meaning and value inside the world. And the lure is incredibly seductive. But we don't spend forever in the world, do we? Sooner or later, whatever happens in the world dissolves to dust. Either we've become dust with it (in which case who cares?) or we're off to something else. That doesn't prove anything by itself, but it suggests at the very least that there is some standard of measure besides greatness.

Such as what? Well, goodness, of course. In a sense that is a circular answer, because the Good is by definition what we all seek. Anything at all that we want is thereby in some sense "good". But bear with me a minute, because I think we both have some sense of what kinds of things form part of a good life. Do they also form part of a great life? Is it possible to have both?

I think it is tough. In the first place, there are a lot of special dangers reserved for the Great. One big risk is that they start believing their own press releases; this inflates your ego so full that it gets smack between you and whatever you are doing, so that it completely blocks any ability to continue on with whatever Great Work you got the acclaim for in the first place. A second risk is that everybody else starts to see you through a plexiglass window; instead of relating to you as a real person, suddenly all they see is this demigod the Celebrity. That blocks any ability to continue to have normal human relationships. Robert Pirsig writes a lot about this in Lila; but in concrete terms just think how the dynamic in your classroom would change if Barack Obama suddenly walked through the door, or some currently hot movie or music star. Like the song "Fame" puts it, "People will see me and die."

So if you become great, you run the risk that you won't be able to keep working, you won't have any normal human relationships, and you will feed on a steady diet of your own ego. Sound like fun? The other fact is that in order to get there, in order to beat out everybody else who is reaching for the same brass ring, you have to be the Best. And this means sacrificing everything to the hard work it takes to beat out all the others. Of course the fantasy is to do it effortlessly, by innate superiority; but only gods can do that. For the rest of us, it means sacrificing everything in your life to work yourself into a position where life itself becomes a misery ... all so that you can make an immortal name for yourself. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound quite so appealing.

But almost. Even with all that, the prospect of earning an immortal name is powerfully seductive. Even with all that, in a certain mood I might be willing to take the risk. It can be scary.

What does it take to achieve greatness? At least two things: ability and opportunity. In one of his more cynical moments, Bill Clinton supposedly expressed regret that the United States didn't face a major war during his Presidency. He knew his own political talents were huge, but the absence of an external calamity meant that he wouldn't go down in history with Lincoln and Roosevelt. There is also a story about Pericles, that one day he was berated by some man from one of the no-account cities that formed part of the Athenian Empire. Apparently this fellow shouted to Pericles that the only reason he could lord it over others was that he was an Athenian, and his city was more powerful than other cities. Pericles answered him, "If you and I had been switched at birth, so I grew up in your city and you grew up in Athens, neither one of us would ever have amounted to anything."

In other words, no matter how vast your talents, you can never achieve greatness in the wrong setting. You can never become a great educator at your school -- not because you haven't the talent to be a great educator (I am convinced that you do, never mind what you think), but because you are at that particular school.

So what am I saying? That you should apply to teach at a different school? Or -- infinitely worse -- that that ship has already sailed, and you weren't on it, and now it's too late? The seduction of greatness whispers both those messages to us -- urgently, longingly, achingly, despairingly -- but those messages are not mine. The fact is that there is a reason you are teaching at your school: namely, that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." I have always taken it for granted that the reason you have taught in so many out-of-the-way places, and the reason you took on such painful work as to be a guardian ad litem, were that all these jobs reflected a kind of discipleship. As a Christian, you have simply been called to do these things. All Christians are (or at least so I understand it). And what this means is that there is a fundamental conflict between the goal of greatness and the goal of following Christ. To choose either one is, in principle at least, to give up the other. Is that not why we hear about winning crowns in Heaven ... because following the Way means giving up any chance for winning them here on earth?

But it is really, really tough. It's every bit as hard as celibacy or temperance. And some days the burden of being locked into a meaningless job in some isolated backwater, far away from the bustle and engaging activity that you feel in your heart must be your proper setting, ... some days that burden is just too heavy to pick up. On those days you find yourself slumped on your couch, staring at the far wall, unable to motivate yourself to stand up or walk across the room or do much of anything else ... except to pour yourself another drink and to sorrow. Those are the days that you want everything to change, and you can't begin to imagine how to change it yourself, so you are left hoping that somehow it will all change itself by magic. And then it doesn't, and you end up even more depressed.

Yeah, I know what those days look like.

I'm really sorry that this is where you've been recently. I don't know if you are still there, or if the gloom is starting to lift. And I don't have any really good advice for getting through it. As I say, I have spent many of those days reminding myself that the risks on the path of greatness are very great, and that if I had chosen that path the odds are overwhelming that I would envy where I am today instead. I remind myself that when Odysseus went to choose his next lifetime, at least as Plato tells the story in Republic X, he chose the life of a private man living a quiet life far away from all the noise and turmoil of public greatness. (At this point another corner of my mind comments sourly, "Well that's just fine once you've already had the chance to live as Odysseus!") And I remind myself that in the long run it's all equally ephemeral, so the permanence of a glorious name can never be as important as the quality of a life well-lived. Yet if quality here-and-now is the true measure of a life, then the longing for greatness is a red herring. Naturally there are plenty of decisions I have made over the years that have diminished the quality of my life in one respect or another. But if I want to revisit my decisions I should look at the ones that have made for a bad life, not the ones that have made me mediocre and obscure. All that latter stuff is just a distraction from what really matters.

I don't know if this is any help. Somehow I'm afraid it isn't.