This post is lightly adapted from a long email I wrote Marie two years ago. If I worked at it I could make it better, I'm sure. But it belongs on this site and not just in my email, so let me put it there now and worry about polishing it another day.
__________
So. Why didn't I go to graduate school? Of course the short answer is that I did: Wife and I were both enrolled in graduate school from 1984-1986. But at the time we left I had no advanced degree, and I never went back. Why not?
Multiple reasons. Let's start with the most ... immediate, concrete, tangible, something like that. When we were there, Wife and I fought a lot. One of the recurring fights was that I spent "all my time" studying and "never" paid any attention to her. Of course I really did spend a lot of time studying; this is me we're talking about. And I probably didn't spend as much time with her as would have been good in a new marriage -- partly because I was studying, and partly because she often wasn't a lot of fun to be around. But I didn't see that so clearly at the time. I knew I was in pain over my marriage, but I had trouble identifying causes. So I bounced between thinking it was all her fault and thinking it was all mine. And the point is that when we left in 1986, I promised myself that I would never enroll in any school ever again so long as I was married to Wife. I had decided that, whatever other factors might or might not have been at work, I was "clearly" too obsessive a student to be allowed to carry on a romantic relationship if I were also studying for a degree.
That promise didn't stop me from thinking about going back. I fantasized about graduate school -- with or without Wife -- off and on for some years. Six, in fact -- right up until my former faculty advisor died in 1992. (That was an important year, in retrospect.) I had always imagined him as my lifeline back into Academia. I never really kept in touch with him, but we're talking about fantasy here. Anyway, that fantasy came to an abrupt end when he died and I really began to accept that what I was doing was not a digression from my real life, but actually WAS my real life.
From that time on, I pretty well abandoned the fantasy, except sometimes explicitly indulging it AS a fantasy. But it became more and more impractical. I had lost touch with all my contacts at school, and had abandoned my program with half my classes incomplete. For all I know, the I's may have turned into F's by now. Then in 1994 we bought a house and got a dog. In 1996 we had a baby, and in 1998 another. Pretty clearly at this point I was launched into whatever trajectory my life was going to have; it made no sense to think about starting over in another direction instead. Even when I lost my job at the end of 2002 and realized I'd have to do SOMETHING new, I never seriously entertained the idea of graduate school. A friend suggested I should teach classes at Adult Ed in some of the areas where I has acquired expertise, or maybe write a book. These ideas were flattering and I toyed with them briefly, but they weren't the same as going back into the heart of the Academy. After all, I needed a job and an income.
Those are the practical, "tangible" reasons. But of course there were others. Again, this is me we're talking about -- a born student. Right? One way or another, it's something I thought about a lot.
SO ALSO. Even while I was in graduate school, I felt like going there represented a failure of nerve. My dad once said that the reason he went to graduate school is that after he got his B.A. he found that the only thing he knew how to do was to go to school. So what the hell? He decided to keep going to school because it was easier than looking for a job. And I saw myself in the same boat. I'd had two years off between undergraduate school and graduate school -- what had I done with the time? Mostly nothing. Well, a few months of substitute teaching at the end, but nothing else. The accusation that maybe I didn't know how to do anything but go to school looked disturbingly plausible. And that made me want to do anything else instead. If all I knew was how to go to school, then damn it! I ought to be forced to do something else instead, just to learn another skill. If I were going to choose an academic life, I wanted it to be a real choice, a choice from strength, not a default that I simply fell into out of weakness and incapacity.
Besides, there was a corner of my brain which associated school with childhood. That's not crazy. Children go to school; adults Do Things Out in the World. So going to graduate school felt like choosing to perpetuate my childhood, perhaps indefinitely. But I was sick of being a child. I wanted -- finally! -- to be an adult. Which meant getting my ass the hell out of school and into the job market.
AND ALSO. You remember what I wrote you back in December? There was a part of me that hated my books, hated them passionately. Just like in the song, I felt like they were a wall cutting me off from other people. From real experiences. From the whole world. A wall that kept me locked in where it was drab, colorless, dusty, boring, and alone. What's more, I felt that this personal wall was just a smaller version of a much bigger wall which cut off the Academy from ... well you remember that back in college we referred to all of non-academic life collectively as the Real World. What were we saying about ourselves then? That's how I felt about it.
AND IN FACT. I felt there was something sterile and impotent about academic life. Clearly part of this feeling is that I associated academic life with my own life in books, and I associated my own bookishness with not having any sex. Equally clearly this chain of inference is provably false: plenty of professors have sex. Plenty of professors have children and raise families. To pursue an academic career does not require a vow of celibacy. But these are feelings, not thoughts. Facts have comparatively little relevance.
But there is a metaphorical sterility to the scholarly life as well. The whole point of scholarly research is to spend your life digging out new information that (for the most part) NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. You work like hell to figure something out that nobody has ever understood before in the history of the world. You sweat over writing and rewriting it, until you say it just right. You fight like hell to get it published. And then nobody reads it. Ever. Nobody gives a shit. Ever. And you might as well make your living by digging a hole in the ground and then filling it in again.
Even you probably don't care that much. How many scholars do you suppose care deeply about the questions they are researching? Isn't it mostly that -- well hell, it looks interesting enough and they've got to be studying something? How many of them will find their own lives transformed by anything they have learned? Isn't it mostly just a job? And if it is, aren't there easier jobs out there? Maybe even ones that pay better?
So a lot of research starts to look like masturbation: it might feel good at the time, but it doesn't generate anything new -- not new life, not even new (or deeper) love. Sterile.
BY COMPARISON. There's a strong overlap with how I feel about monasticism. This is something Debbie talked about from time to time: she wants to be a Buddhist nun. And the thought of it always bugged me. Why? Why wouldn't I want to be a monk? Well, there's the vow of celibacy to start with. There's also that you can't leave the monastery. You are as if locked in. Which makes monasticism sound a bit like prison. (Both prisoners and monks live in cells.) Now, the monastery we visited together hosts a lot of retreats. People go there for a weekend or a week. And if you live there as a monk or a nun, any relative of yours is welcome to come visit you for as long as they like. But you can't leave without permission of the abbot. It's a much nicer place than any prison I've ever heard of. But you can't leave. That's part of the deal.
ON THE OTHER HAND. You have to live somewhere. You can't live in two places at once. For somebody committed to the Buddha Dharma, wouldn't it be more pleasant to live somewhere that everybody else is as committed as you are? Isn't that actually the point? What sense does it make to complain that you can't leave?
MOREOVER. I have been on the campus of the local state university from time to time over the years, for lectures or movies or plays. I have been on retreat at the monastery, as I mentioned. The places in all the world where I feel most content and at home are university campuses and monastery grounds. There is something in the air in these places that feels like home in a way I have found nowhere else.
How can I so love the environment and still flee the life that produces it?
This is a great paradox for me, and I do not know how to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment