What does freedom have to do with it?

Last night I wrote to D that I won't be taking the business trip we had planned to use for our next meeting. I added that I had not figured out a plan what to do next.

She wrote back to me as follows:

Dearest Hosea,

I had already figured it out.

Really...it's pretty much up to you to decide to see me. This is a big country and there are many options. It means taking a number of steps you are reluctant to take, and I can't help you take them. I can take the same steps, but you already know that I am willing to schedule the time and pay my share of the bill, which now would include a hotel and car. I can hope you will take the risk, but I'm frankly not sure you will. Franzen's bleak view of freedom (his characters all have affairs that end unhappily) may be yours as well. The narrator says at one point, "the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality as prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage." I understand that freedom can be a curse rather than a blessing, and I'm asking not that you see me to be free from all of your commitments to Wife and the boys, but that you might view seeing me as freedom for something more worthwhile and significant. Otherwise, you are left to mend your relationship with Wife to some degree and forge a fragile treaty with your unhappiness, unable to see anything more promising to give your life meaning.That's a wilderness, Hosea. I understand that blank freedom and irresponsibility breaks a certain emptiness, but I also believe that Franzen's view of freedom in a post-religious age is not the only option; that we might be able to glimpse another, more expansive way to live.

I see this possibility clearly in the recent letter and phone call received from my daughter [Brittany] in Istanbul. By far the most rewarding parts of the trip have been the time spent in Bulgaria and Romania; she sees a society, fast disappearing, that is truly pre-modern in many ways. Brittany is so fascinated and impressed that she plans to return to both countries as early as this summer to visit the mountains and valleys that will be gone forever once highways and modern 'conveniences' destroy so much of the old forests and way of life. Bulgaria only has seven million people-only seven million-- spread thinly over a huge territory. Brittany says that she traveled, often on foot or with others as a rider, through miles and miles of pristine wilderness totally untouched by human civilization. She says she has never seen anything as beautiful; I know I haven't and I'd so like to do so. Her adventures sound remarkable; a bit scary, but she and her boyfriend seem to be good traveling companions. Brittany doesn't mind being lost and her boyfriend seems to believe that everything will work out without spending money to be rescued from inconvenience or frustration. I understand from my husband that they both took out 400 dollars a few weeks ago and they haven't gone through it yet. They pay for nothing except food purchased at local markets; everything else is offered to them by others. I'm not suggesting that you and I meet somewhere without any bed and board arrangements, but I certainly think we might explore some area of our country without spending a fortune. What appeals to you?

This is a turning point, dearest one. I have to hold on to the passion I hear in your voice and experience in your arms. I can't believe that you will just walk away, back into gray reality. Am I right? Only time will tell, but we need to see each other. You have not called, I have not written, and this won't do. I vote that you grab a metaphorical motorcycle, and ride on muddy roads four or five hours to remind yourself of why you might want to travel outside your narrow, if gilded, community. There is so much more, so very much more...

All my love,
D

I read this, and I am left not knowing which way is up. Freedom? I certainly wasn't thinking of the whole thing in terms of freedom. Honestly I'm not sure I know what to do with freedom. I have sometimes said, a little cynically, that freedom may be overrated. The people I have known over the years with the most free time on their hands and the fewest obligations don't often look to be the happiest.

Then when I hear myself saying this, I blanch to realize how much I sound like Wife, fleeing into the tyranny of obligation because anything else is so scary. Have I been doing the same thing? Yeah.

I wish I hadn't just realized that. It puts a cloud on my whole day. Shit.

When is our next date?

Ever since our last date, D has been asking me when the next one will be. She has not been terribly subtle about it. Up till now I've been telling her probably late November, because I was expecting to have to take a business trip near Thanksgiving that would have made a convenient opportunity. But no actual date was set, and no tickets were bought. She has been fretting and moping.

Yesterday I discovered I really won't have to take that trip after all. There is no particular reason I can see that I'll have to travel for work until maybe January. But I have not figured out what to tell D yet. I mean, I suppose I could just make up some reason to leave town anyway, and we have a short vacation together. But I'm not near as good at making shit up on the spur of the moment as D is. Or I could tell her it's going to be a while longer before we see each other. But then I'll have to deal with her depression and anxiety.

Sometimes I think this is why I need to stay out of romantic involvements at all -- I start thinking it is up to me to manage her emotional life, to take care of things so she won't be upset. To make things better for her, out of sympathy or pity. [We have a whole discussion about pity -- with respect to Wife -- that I keep meaning to post. I'll get around to it some day. But meanwhile ...] Then I end up feeling manipulated, and I get grumpy and bitter. Not a good pattern.

It's not that I don't want to see her. Of course I want to see her. But it's not such a big deal for me if it's this month or next month. When it happens, that's nice. When it doesn't, oh well. It will later. She doesn't have that same equanimity. It seems, sometimes, like she depends on me to keep herself on track, like I'm her whole world. But I don't want to be her whole world.

Maybe she just needs to find a guy closer to home ....

Cleaving

A while ago I wrote about seeing the movie "Julie & Julia." In the comments, L and I talked briefly about Julie Powell's follow-up book (if you can call it that), Cleaving. At the time I hadn't read it yet, but I have to admit my curiosity was provoked by the vitriolic reviews on Amazon. (Honestly, most of the reviewers gave it a 1.) So last Wednesday, I checked it out of the library; and this evening, as I sat around handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters, I finished it.

The ultra-brief summary is this: over several years, Julie Powell had been having an affair with a guy she met in college before she was ever married. But she was not very good at hiding it. Her husband Eric found out, and it caused a lot of turmoil in her marriage. After she published Julie & Julia, she spent six months apprenticing as a butcher while trying to sort out her life. After that six months she was still an emotional mess, so she travelled some. And after a while she got better. Julie Powell shows herself to be obsessive, to have poor impulse control, to be capable of over-the-top emotional tantrums, to be alcoholic. She does not paint a flattering picture of herself. The critics on Amazon panned her writing en route to panning her personality. They said she's a mess and the whole book is Too Much Information and why do we have to read it anyway?

Me, I loved it. OK, I'm not going to get in the ring fighting for my life over whether her prose will echo down through the ages; but shit, she never claimed to be writing Madame Bovary or Othello. She learned to write by blogging, which means that whatever is on her mind goes onto the page; the virtue of blogging is that its very immediacy should make it a more honest medium for us to reveal our faults in. God knows I reveal too many of my faults here. And she certainly reveals plenty of hers. Of course it is possible that all this proves is that I love crazy women: that would certainly explain my taste for "high-maintenance" women like Wife and D, to say nothing of bloggers like Violent Acres. (Naturally none of my invited readers counts as "crazy," though I'm fond of you all anyway.)

What I found uncanny, quite apart from her ability to map her own obsessions so exactly, were the moments that sounded like they had been lifted directly from my marriage to Wife. Right up front, on page 4, she writes:

The nagging voice I've all my life heard in my head, the one people might call addiction or restlessness or waywardness, but which is to me almost an embodiment, something outside of myself, impish, far from benign, but also inspiring and not entirely unconcerned with my self-interest -- Eric believed in it. He feared it sometimes, but he believed in it.

That was us, too. I would never have thought to put it like that, would never have thought to remember that as one of the telling details of our early years together, Wife and me. But she too had the obsessive restlessness that would come on her unawares, as if it were outside herself, pointing her in directions unimagined. And I, too, believed in it. Even when it was scary.

How did Julie Powell manage to write so exactly about my marriage?

I won't say that the rest of it proves to be a carbon copy. No two marriages are ever exactly alike. But there are moments that I recognize. Yes, there are. The one thing I could have wished out of the book is that she had come to more of an understanding of what drove her -- her, and her husband and her lover. She gets to a stable point where things are better and the future looks more hopeful, but she never quite reaches one of those "sweet mystery of life at last I've found you" moments. And it would have been nice if she had. But after all, the main reason I wish she had come to that profound understanding is so that I could appropriate it for my own situation. And if I haven't reached a point of enlightened understanding about my own marriage yet, how can I criticize Julie for failing to do it for me?

Don't read the book if you are squeamish: there are a lot of technical details about the art of butchery that tender minds won't want to know. Don't read the book if you think that the first-person narrator should be a moral exemplar, or even an especially admirable human being. Julie admits in an interview I found somewhere that she is glad her mother has refused to read the book. I don't know what she ever told her mother when she was writing it, but the stories she tells in the book are ones no mother would want to read about her daughter.

But if you are interested in scrutinizing the dynamics of infidelity, to see what makes it tick -- or if you just love crazy women -- it's worth a look.

What wine goes with Hallowe'en candy?

This is just silly, but I'm passing it along in a spirit of whimsy. It's an article I found online to answer that burning question we have all wrestled with, "What wine goes best with candy corn?"

Cheers!

My brother is getting married!

Last night at dinner, Wife and Son 2 told me that my brother had called a couple days ago -- my baby brother in his mid-forties, the rock musician in the family -- with the news that he and his long-term girlfriend are getting married. (Maybe I'll call her A, for now at least.) I was a little bit surprised, but only because they have been together so very long by now that I figured if they were ever going to have any interest in marriage they would have tied the knot long since. Certainly I have no qualms about the match -- A is a lovely and gracious woman, and the two of them are plainly devoted to each other. Wife says she offered to help sew a wedding gown if they wanted her help. Privately I thought this was a hilarious idea, because Wife's taste and A's are so different they might as well have come from different planets. But be that as it may.

All the same, I have found myself feeling a little odd about the whole thing as I have mulled it these last twenty-four hours. I want to be straightforwardly happy for them, really I do. I am fond of them both. And yet ... I guess it is just poor timing, because I feel so down about my own marriage. I guess I have just extended that gloom to the point that I have started feeling ambivalent about marriage as such. That has to be it. And of course I know that's crazy. I still think marriage is fine for most people, ... don't I? I still think marriage works fine for, ... ummm, ... the people for whom it works fine. Right? And I don't want to let my own rainclouds shower on their parade.

I passed the news on to D, and she was disturbed about something altogether different. For her it rekindled her anxieties about "Hosea's family will never accept me." She wrote:

I am delighted that Brother and A are planning on getting married. I know you wish them every happiness.

Bump! I so often feel like this when you discuss your family, which is why I am so reluctant to say anything. First, I don't want to seem like I'm criticizing anyone because I don't understand anything well enough to critique it, and second, what I do read about seems to indicate a much higher degree of family unity than sometimes you acknowledge...or --gosh--I haven't got a clue. That's it... I am totally in the dark. Can you walk me through some of this? I'm trying to imagine anyone in my family telling my husband something as important as "I'm getting married" before telling me. Or really talking to him at all beyond pleasantries. And everyone loves my husband in my family. But they call to talk to me.... I somehow thought your family did not have a close relationship with Wife, but I appear to be wrong. My family also knows the rough outline and status of my relationship with my husband and they are all sympathetic and discreetly supportive. You may have mentioned a planned separation from Wife to your father, but I have yet to hear that you have ever discussed with either parent, even in the most rudimentary way, the true relationship you have had with Wife for years. Brother seems to know nothing.

I'll be honest; if it was anyone but you, I'd say that something isn't right here. What I do know is that I cannot imagine myself ever being introduced as your ....girlfriend? Friend? The Hosea family unit seems to include Wife permanently and I would have no place. I'm trying to imagine my husband offering to do something for my family as intimate as sewing a wedding gown. I'm drawing a blank, and I'm feeling very insecure. I guess that's all right...it doesn't really change anything but it seems strange to me. I can't imagine not wanting my family to know about you; two of my brothers already do and I have left the door wide open for the rest of my family to learn the same.

Wife always maintained that your loyalty and unshakable commitment to family and vows made it impossible for you to be less than a gentleman when it came to talking about anyone in your most intimate circle. I wonder if she is correct. It's admirable, but it leaves no possibility for a more substantial place for me in your life.

I've never wanted to be part of your infidelity bloggers network, but today, I might ask them what they thought. I'm just completely confused.

Gosh, I hadn't looked at it that way at all. I was moping for my own reasons, totally unrelated to that stuff. But I, too, found it a bit strange that I had heard in such a roundabout way. So I sent Brother a quick e-mail congratulating him but also asking whether I had in fact gotten the news right.

I heard back in less than half an hour. Yes, the news was right. He also explained how the news had travelled, and the story makes complete sense. Brother is also about the only person I know to insert footnotes into an e-mail ....

Thank you! It is true! I had sort of intended* to tell everybody last time we were all together, but never quite found the time when everybody was in the same vicinity. Then we ended up telling Mom and Dad later that night. Then Dad mentioned it to Son 1, who I thought I heard told you. (Perhaps not.) So, I decided to call your house a couple days ago just to actually speak about it “personally” rather than by proxy! I don’t remember if I asked Wife to tell you, but anyway I already thought you knew (see above). Anyway, it’s now been quite a few weeks since I proposed (yes, she accepted), I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to getting around to making sure everybody knows. I probably should have called everybody on the same day. Maybe next time!**

Anyway, we haven’t decided on when or where, but we’re pretty sure about who, which is what matters first and foremost. Boyfriend/girlfriend sounded good for a while, but not anymore. I didn’t want to become her 50-year-old boyfriend I guess. Of course, what we do day in and day out is basically the same, and we had said things about “forever” and so on before, but it just feels a bit different and nicer to be clear about it....

Thank you so much for the wishes. We’ll talk soon (Thanksgiving?) and we can reconnect then.

Cheers,
Brother

* “Sort of intended” -- therein lay the problem.
** Joke.

I forwarded this story on to D,but I haven't heard back from her yet. I don't know how she will respond. Me, I'm still feeling funny about how funny I feel ... or something like that. I'm not quite sure, actually.

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.

Wrestling with failure 1, “Forget you even know me”

D has been really down the last few days. Her job has been getting to her. I know, I know, ... you’re tired of hearing about her crappy job teaching too many classes a day to unmotivated students and reporting to a criminally mendacious administration. You hear it a lot. But it takes a lot out of her morale. And some days she looks back on what she wanted to be, and the contrast is just too much. So we’ve been writing back and forth about this.

She started the conversation about a week ago. Wife and Son 2 and I drove out to Hogwarts because it was “Parents’ Day,” when we got to meet all of Son 1’s teachers and learn about the program for his freshman year of high school. Then after that all the school closed for a few days so that all the students could go home for a while after having been away nearly two months. I had told D that this might interfere with my writing for a couple of days, so she knew all about it in advance. And at some point during the weekend she wrote me as follows:

“I am glad Son 1 is fitting in so well and the two days have been rewarding. I actually tried to learn about your schedule at Hogwarts, just to help me know what you were seeing and doing, but that was a mistake. Looking at the pictures and reading the site just made me acutely aware of the differences between the education a person receives at Hogwarts and the lessons taught in my school. I found myself embarrassed (why did I ever take you into my classroom?) humiliated, and yes, angry. I don’t know how to close that gap, but I realize that Son 1 will not, in a million years, really understand the experiences of my students, and I can’t begin to imagine what life must feel like at Hogwarts. The class issues, the race issues, the history and experiences of his parents...all these differences add up to another world. The implications for civil society are huge. I don’t know what to do or to say on a personal level. I feel a welter of emotions; none of them happy....

I need to concentrate on grading anyway. I’m way behind and I’m becoming panicked and worried; I feel like I’m doing a terrible job and I need to go better. Not that my students will ever compete with your children or mine, but that injustice causes me to be blinded with tears of anger and frustration. My real struggle is to carry that weight without sinking like a stone and without a certain edgy anger. I’m not there yet.

So I’ll leave you, driving home on a beautiful fall day with both boys in the car and the prospect of a delightful holiday ahead for the entire family. I wish you much happiness, fewer interruptions from work and, please, forget you even know me for the duration of Son 1’s break.”

Cheerful stuff, huh?

I wrote her back, in part, as follows:

“Of course you know that forgetting you exist is out of the question -- not for the duration of Son 1's vacation, not for the weekend, not even for a moment. But your letter troubles me.

I could have understood it had you spoken of a sense of despondency or defeatedness from comparing the gritty reality of your school with the photos of Hogwarts, but that's not what you said. Instead you spoke of embarrassment and humiliation -- of asking yourself why you ever let me see your classroom -- and I have to admit it sounds a little odd to me that you identified those feelings instead. Can I say why it sounds odd to me? I think there are three reasons, very different from each other.

The first reason is, in this case, far the most superficial, but it is also absolutely true. It's just that I love you -- so much that embarrassment seems unimaginable to me. What I mean by that is, ... well, let's look at your class room. How could I possibly fail to adore it? It's your classroom! That by itself means that of course I'll adore it....

The second reason is the most practical: it is the line of thought which concedes there are disappointing things about your school, but which remarks immediately that none of them is your fault. You aren't responsible for the disadvantages which so burden your students; nor for the deep dishonesty of the administration; nor yet for the poor choices of the novice teachers....

Then there is a third line of thought, radically different from the first two, which nuances that second reason by saying that no, you are not responsible for all those obstacles in your environment; but you chose them anyway. I may be able to explain this point best by using an extended example.

I think in a way that for you to tell me you are embarrassed by your school, and by letting me see your classroom, is a lot like my saying that I am ashamed to let you see our house because it is always such a wreck. Of course it is a wreck, notwithstanding the valiant way you fought to better it while you were here [see the story of our second date, here and following]; and of course at some level, yes, I am ashamed to let you see the place. But the three levels apply here too. (1) I know you will continue to love me anyway. (2) I know you know that the clutter and the deep uncleanliness isn't my doing, and that I'd be more diligent about cleaning it up if I didn't feel like the only one to give a damn. So far, so good.

But it is also true, at the deepest level, that I signed up for this willingly. Twenty-six years ago, I stood up before witnesses and said "I do"; and while it is certain that I did not know in detail what the consequences would be of handing over my decisions and willpower to this madwoman, there was some level on which I knew that they wouldn't be good. But I did it anyway. To this day I'm not sure that I have figured out a complete inventory of reasons why I did it.... But that's as may be. It's a choice I made, and the consequences -- including the fact that I live in perpetual clutter -- all flow from it. To be ashamed of the outcome now is, as Nietzsche put it, "to leave my decision in the lurch"; to forget that, at some deep level, there was something important I wanted to get out of this choice that I made.

It's the same with your teaching at your school, except in your case I think the reason behind the choice is easier to find (and more honorable). It's not like you couldn't have chosen some other outcome in your life. If you had really wanted to teach at some other kind of school -- Exeter, Andover, Hogwarts -- you could be there now. God knows you're capable enough!... But instead you chose the place where you are today. Now of course there were practical reasons constraining your choice. There always are. But if teaching at Andover or Hogwarts had been important enough, you would have found a way around them....

That doesn't mean there aren't days -- how I know those days! -- when your choice makes you gnash your teeth with rage and anguish and regret: days when the students are being ridiculous, when the administration is being more than normally dishonest and corrupt and criminal, when every muscle aches from exhaustion and your soul hurts worse than your body. Yup. Been there, done that. But days like that pass. One day, you will no longer hurt and your soul will be at peace. And the question then will be whether the goal you wanted to achieve was worth the cost.

What is the goal? Why do you choose schools and settings like this? I've always assumed that at some level you do it out of discipleship, as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. But if that's true, if my guess is right, then you will always teach in the kind of school where the students have things tough: whether they are "at-risk" or "underserved" or whatever the technical term is at this or that particular school. If my guess is right, then the odds are you will never teach at a school like Exeter or Andover or Hogwarts -- not because you couldn't (you could!!) but because at some deep level of your identity you choose not to. But in that case the comparison between your school and a place like Hogwarts is a foregone conclusion; and so far from being embarrassed by it, you might just figure it is an inevtiable by-product of the way you carry out the challenge of discipleship.

Well then, if this is the station you have taken up to serve God, why aren't your results better?... Let me recall the comparison I drew between your career and my marriage. I think we both took on challenges that were beyond us. You hoped to raise the valley to the plain, or even partway up the mountain -- not for one or two students in your lifetime, but for an entire class at once -- preferably year after year. I hoped (more modestly) to save one lousy human life -- one soul, no more -- from the countless demons that beset her. Up till now, we have both failed. But remember what I said before, that Sister Failure is not our enemy. Maybe in the end it will turn out to be OK that we failed. Maybe all it means is that neither of us is God. In any event, let's neither of us be embarrassed or ashamed -- in front of each other -- for those failures. Let us trust in each other's love, and in the prospect of unbounded forgiveness.”

D answered that she was grateful for my saying kind things to her, but I obviously didn’t succeed in improving her mood much.

“Your comments about my choices and your choices seem about right. I know I am struggling more than I let on; I am drinking far more than I ever have before.... Part of the problem with alcohol abuse is the secrecy you develop around drinking--how much, how often, all the excuses.

I am deeply lonely. My daughter wrote yesterday and accused me of being incredibly passive about my life and I responded with a shrug and silence. I know I'm passive, for all the reasons you laid out a couple weeks ago. Perhaps I don't have the faith in Providence I need to make a major change. I know that I have a hard time just getting up and doing enough to get by. Right now, I don't feel like a decent teacher, let alone as good as you think I am. I am also impatient with my less experienced colleagues because they make my job far more difficult.... My frustrations, my deep loneliness, my sense that nothing has meaning or worth leave me in a very dark place with no reason to care....

You are right to wonder why we have chosen such impossible tasks because indeed, we both know there can be no victory. The odds were and are stacked against any easy success and perhaps it was never realistic to begin with; the Kingdom is not of this world. That doesn't discount what we do, but it's more a case of providing witness to God's coming presence than changing the world in some dramatic fashion. I know you love me and I know that on some level, you really do affirm what I am doing. I know you don't judge my classroom...except I also know that you would never dream of sending your boys to my class. You know there is a better system of education.... I'm embarrassed because I know this...I realize that you enjoyed visiting my class just because I teach there, not because there is anything truly notable about what I do there, the same way you had a great time at Son 2's school play without thinking it was remarkable theater. Unfortunately, I'd like to be a great educator. I know I fail. On some deep level, that bothers me. I know that in the end, all will be well, but I also realize that now, so much is broken and grieving. Most of the time I can live within this tension, but recently, I'm failing...sliding off the roof, you might say, unable to play my violin with either conviction or beauty.”

It was hard to know what to say to this, and so it took me several days to reply.