Education

(part two of three)

I have a brother-in-law who has always surrounded himself with books. For him, the life of the mind is the only life worth living. During family visits, I would occasionally join in late-night philosophical and political discussions with him and his grown children, and they appreciated having my voice in the mix. But one night, I made the mistake of admitting that I got as much pleasure out of a glass of good whiskey as I did out of a good book. At that moment, I fell so far in my brother-in-law’s estimation that I could practically feel the temperature drop.

I was not surprised. Years before, I’d had a similar experience as a student at Princeton. Under a tree on a warm spring day, I fell into a discussion with a graduate teaching assistant who had found my work competent but completely lacking in inspiration. He asked me what I wanted to get out of life, and I replied that I just wanted to find happiness.

“Happiness!?” he said, nearly spitting out his cigar. “Where do you expect to find it, under a rock? Happiness comes from engaging deeply with something. Don’t you have any intellectual curiosity?”

Well, of course I had curiosity, but it had always driven me to find out a little bit about everything, without necessarily caring about the details. I wanted to enjoy my life. I wasn’t convinced that the road to fulfillment involved knowing more things.

“Then why are you at Princeton, of all places?” the TA asked.

It was a very good question. I’d always done well in school, but it had never been for love of the subject matter. As someone who was physically awkward and socially inept, I’d always found that being a good student was my only available route to acceptance.

Getting high grades had won me the grudging respect of my peers, supportive attention from my teachers, and expressions of love from my parents. And fortunately — through the early years of high school, at least — academic achievement came easily to me. I rarely took notes or studied for a test. Even if I didn’t understand something, my writing skills were good enough that I was able to sound like I understood it.

But when I got to my senior year in high school, the difficulty level of the coursework finally caught up to my ability, and I found myself having to struggle just like “ordinary” students. It wasn’t a motivational experience. There was nothing I wanted to know badly enough that I was willing to work at it.

Fortunately, by then I’d already accumulated a scholastic record that was good enough to get me into a top-tier college. I applied to Princeton because my parents insisted that I try for at least one Ivy League school, but I had no intention of going there. I was sure the students would be cold and stuck-up, and it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to fake my way through the coursework. I procrastinated shamelessly on the application and neglected to apply for the optional in-person interview. I subconsciously hoped that if I ignored Princeton, it would go away.

Despite my best efforts, the Princeton admissions office chose to accept me. At that point, my parents began an all-out campaign to protect me from my own sluggardliness. Their son had an opportunity to attend one of the top schools in the country — an opportunity they’d never had — and they’d be damned if they were going to let me blow it. When I showed no inclination to visit the Princeton campus, my mother dragged me to the Port Authority in New York and deposited me on a bus to central New Jersey.

Spring that year had been cold and rainy, and I’d viewed a number of other schools through a chilly, gray mist. But the day I visited Princeton, the sun shone brightly, and a warm breeze stirred the magnolia blossoms. The campus seemed like a mythic kingdom. I instantly fell in love with its Gothic architecture, its green courtyards, and its wooded sanctuaries. I chatted with a number of students who seemed warm, genuine, and astonishingly normal. I took a campus tour, and when we walked into Nassau Hall — the school’s oldest building, which had once housed the entire college — I felt my feet mold themselves to the rutted stone steps that had been worn down by generations of students walking on them. Suddenly, every other school I’d seen seemed temporary and insubstantial. I knew then that I needed to be part of that venerable chain of Princetonians.

My love for the history and physical beauty of the university never abated. Eventually, as a Princeton student, I trained to be a campus tour guide, and later became president of the student-run tour service. But my association with Princeton felt hollow without my engaging in the intellectual tradition was the main reason for the school’s existence. I was a student, but it was clear I’d never be a scholar.

(To be continued in part 3)

(part one of three)

In the first semester of my freshman year at Princeton University, I took an English course called Modern Drama. Under the supervision of an apathetic graduate student, twelve of us were sitting around a table and discussing our first assigned play, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

“I think Chekhov was brilliant to make such a profound social statement in the form of a farce,” said one student.

“Even though it’s a comedy, he clearly has great compassion for his characters,” said another.

I was startled. “This is my first exposure to Chekhov,” I said. “I read this play without knowing anything about it beforehand. And so, I have to say I’m surprised to hear all of you refer to it as a comedy. I had no idea it was supposed to be funny. My sense of it was that it was deeply sad.”

A second-year student glared at me from across the table. “You didn’t realize it was a comedy?” she said. “Then what did you think about all those scenes with Pishchik groveling for money? What did you think about Gayev’s ode to his bookcase? What did you think about Yepikhodov and his accidents?”

I stared back at her dumbly.

“Well?” she said, drawing herself up self-righteously. “Didn’t you think?”

Well, no, actually; I didn’t. The assignment had been to read the play; it had never occurred to me that I was supposed to think about it. So far as I knew, art — dramatic or otherwise — was something that was supposed to be experienced and responded to on a feeling level. The idea of thinking about a play seemed as absurd as thinking about a painting or a symphony.

That student’s scathing comment was my first sign that I was now living in a very different universe. At Princeton, the proper response to anything — including a painting or a symphony — was to think about it, to analyze it. We were scholars, and that’s what scholars are supposed to do.

In art classes, we would analyze the structure and iconography of a painting. In music classes, we would examine a composer’s use of harmony and counterpoint. To me, this sort of work seemed not only tedious, but irrelevant. The important questions, it seemed to me, were “Why is this painting beautiful?” or “Why does this piece of music move me?” The answers to questions like these remained beyond the reach of scholarly analysis.

Because I’d always shown a talent for writing, it was generally assumed that I’d major in English at Princeton. My experience in Modern Drama put a quick end to that expectation. Not only did I have no aptitude for analyzing a piece of literature; I failed to understand why I was supposed to analyze a piece of literature. Clearly, literature was capable of being entertaining, emotionally powerful, and even thought-provoking. But I couldn’t see how it actually mattered, and I had little patience for people who did think so. This proved to be a particular problem during my upperclass years, when I found myself in a relationship with Marcia, an English major.

In those days before word processors, when school papers were generally drafted on a legal pad, one of the responsibilities of a romantic partner was to sit through the night at a typewriter and type up each freshly handwritten page.[1] It would be three o’clock in the morning, and I’d be squinting at a paragraph that Marcia had indecipherably scribbled in the margin. “What does this say?” I’d ask her. She’d press her nose against the page and read to me what she’d written: some apparent nonsense about symbolic patterns in Dickens or figurative language in George Eliot. “Great,” I would say caustically. “That was worth asking about.”

Granted, this was not a useful attitude to take at three o’clock in the morning. But it truly bothered me that she was wasting her considerable intelligence and effort — not to mention my lost sleeping time — on work of so little consequence. “In case you didn’t realize it,” I would tell her, “the stuff in these books isn’t real. Somebody made it all up.”

Marcia had the last laugh, of course. The papers that seemed so clearly pointless to me were regarded as gold by her professors. She eventually graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. And as much as I wanted to be happy for her, what I really felt was envy.

(To be continued in part 2)

[1] This is a good time to note that Marcia has taken issue with what I said in my post “Paper Delivery.” As she remembers it, she typed my thesis. I think we’ll need to leave it to future biographers to sort this one out.