Vocational Agriculture

There is something wrong of late. I’m chalking it up to a post-achievement slump. This is normal but still boring and not a little annoying. The grad school applications went in, we traveled compulsively for ten weeks, we celebrated my birthday, we feted my promotion to an award-winning playwright (I won A.C.T.’s Mamet Writing Competition), and we bounced enthusiastically about my wait-listing at NYU. All in all, it’s been a very successful winter and spring. In the midst of this, I decided it was time to take on a broader writing plan and a fitness regimen, but, as I struggle without deadlines on the former and plateau on the latter, I grow restless.

Deadlines lend a structure to life which can be addictive. You know what you’re shooting for: however much you may struggle to meet the requirements, at some point it will be done and you can sleep again. It’s more difficult to see or feel those arcs when you’re on your own, constructing a life for yourself. In the convocation address at my graduation, then college president Mary Patterson McPherson noted that the goal of a liberal arts education was to make your mind an interesting place to live. I was drawn to the broad permissions of the statement and the structure it lent to a life of academic inquisitiveness which might otherwise seem distracted or formless, without target. After all, we live in our minds, no matter what we’re up to with our hands and days.

The argument that at least part of the aim of a life is to be interesting and interested (from which will spring all manner of active good) is, I realize retrospectively, a justification for my long argument in favor of a canon in education. I certainly missed it, in every sense, in my own dismal schooling, making up for it only partially with wide reading outside school. (An experience for which I have found it difficult to fully forgive my small-town-bent parents and which was enlightening as to the general state of education for kids without other means at their disposal.) But where is this build-up of knowledge and exposure leading? What’s the ultimate point of all my writing and all my time on the trapeze?

When I was younger, I would assert without a blush that my goal was to be great. Without equivocation great and not just famous (which must necessarily accompany true greatness, else how will your work propagate, the essential factor in greatness?) Now, I am increasingly challenged in defining that term. The most satisfying writing I do is not aimed at greatness, it’s aimed at writing well on the topic at hand. Most serious achievement is likely the same. Scientists do not have a target for a breakthrough. They work and re-focus and work some more. If there is a breakthrough it is in the work, not the aiming. The unfortunate and frightening fact for the ambitious is that there may be no sure road to greatness besides cultivating a balance between constructive imagination and brute force effort. That is, putting in relentless hours of work coupled with the ability to deviate from a plan or re-focus on that plan as intelligent and frivolous opportunity present themselves. That is an art unto itself and, as far as I have been able to identify it when engaging it, a satisfying one.

By this token, we work because it has intermediate satisfactions and, occasionally, official rewards. Where this work ultimately leads – to broader greatness or simply a satisfying, interesting life among people we respect and who respect us – is not in our hands. That’s a scary conclusion on one hand (we do not control our place in the world and history) and a relief on the other (we have things to do which are absorbing and, importantly, do-able, as historical planning is not). I do not see another conclusion at this juncture, so I will settle there for now. In my experience, namely several fallow periods between jobs and schools, focusing anxiously and obsessively on the outcome of the work that interests you does not in fact yield better results, mainly any clarity about what to do differently to ensure greatness will be the outcome. So work it is. Onward.