QOTD (2011-01-25); or, Nostalgia and the Homoerotic Literary Tradition

It’s disconcerting how much I identify with a teenage Terry Castle, as represented in her memoir, The Professor:

In high school I had been almost freakishly solitary and skittish, with no idea how to comport myself in ordinary-teenager fashion…. Bizarre as it sounds, by the time I left for college I had never once called anyone on the telephone or invited a classmate over after school. Nor had I myself been so called or invited…. On the contrary: I’d been reclusive, a regular Secret-Garden-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Girl-Hysteric-in-Training. At seventeen, I remained passionately (if uneasily) mother devoted; frighteningly watchful, in school and out; abnormally well read in Dumas novels, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, H.P. Lovecraft, and the lives of the poets…. I began devouring certain louche modern authors in secret: Gide, Wilde, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, even Yukio Mishima, then at the height of his celebrity in the West. Sexual deviance, or at least what I conceived it to be, began to exert a certain unhallowed, even gothic allure—a glamorous, decayed, half-Satanic romance…. Not least among the attractions that such literary homosexuality proffered: some drastic psychic deliverance from familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor…. As for “homosexual practices”—and I confess I wasn’t exactly sure, mechanically speaking, what they were—they sounded sterile and demonic but also madly titillating…. Anything could happen, it seemed, in the fascinating world of sexual inverts. Lesbianism didn’t figure much, if at all, in these early reveries: one of the oddest parts of the fantasy, I guess, was that I was male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents. I knew more about green carnations, the Brompton Oratory, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the curious charms of Italian gondoliers than I did about Willa Cather or Gertrude Stein—not to mention Garbo or Stanwyck or Dusty Springfield.

I was already feeling nostalgic about high school from earlier this afternoon, when something one of my high-school friends posted on Facebook reminded me of those lonely quiet days of negotiating friendship for the very first time, bumbling step-by-step out of the world of Musketeers into the bright cloudless San Diego shopping-mall sunlight, learning for the first time at the age of 16 or 17 how to socialize. At the very same time as I was learning how to socialize, I was learning how to study sexuality—putting off the terrifying process of having to confront myself and who I was and what I wanted by discoveries no less thrilling and rewarding. I can remember where I was, how I felt, when I read “Reading Gaol” and the Calamus poems and Howl. I remember lugging around school volumes of Krafft-Ebing and Kinsey borrowed from the UCSD library, because I thought it made me cool. I remember sitting up in a dark bedroom at 3 am on a hot summer night in the dead-quiet suburbs, talking to my high-school friend on AIM while we simultaneously watched Shortbus together. I remember being trapped by the walls, by the air, by the cars we all were stuck in all the time when we drove down Interstate 15 into or out of the city. I remember reading Viola in Twelfth Night for one English class. Teaching Whitman and Ginsberg in another. Adapting and staging and deliberately cross-casting The Importance of Being Earnest in another.

Like Symonds, like Terry Castle, like me, so many of us believe in another world, a place where glamor and panache and camp and beauty take the place of gender conformity and Hollister clothing and pink stucco houses. So many of us read our Plato, read our Wilde, lived our pretentious little teenage lives in a performative effort to clap! clap if we believed in fairies! So many of us grew up and didn’t quite ever find that the real world lived up to the hazy, lilac-scented Arcadian visions of the earliest chapters of Brideshead Revisited and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (As a teenager, I was never quite able to read all the way to the ends of those books, and watch the paradise slip away into madness.) But I’d like to think we all cultivate our own gardens, all find our paradises within, happier far. I’d like to think that Symonds’ creation of a homosexual culture and his affair with his gondolier at long-last helped to put some of his demons to rest; I’d like to think that Castle’s wonderfully dry self-deprecating humor bespeaks contentment with the material niceties of her life as a successful academic, far from the barren stucco San Diegan wilderness (mentally, if not physically. But I swear, Palo Alto’s nicer than University City anytime). And I dream that someday someone will pay me to introduce the homoerotic literary tradition to the young people who desperately need a little camp and glamor in their lives. But the thing is, even if plans B through Z fail and no one ever does, I’ll still be the 14-year-old kid who strutted over the hills of a southern-California suburb one September in floral-patterned knee-breeches, black lace-up boots, a frilly shirt and doublet and a broad-brimmed hat with an enormous purple peacock feather pinned to the brim. “Notes on Camp“? Baby, who needs ’em? I’ve got the text memorized!

I’ll end this reverie on the perfect note that Madonna’s “Vogue” serendipitously came up on shuffle.

In Which We Turn a Corner; or, Reflections at the End of Another Year

I don’t need this space anymore. This fact occurred to me one of these evenings of the holiday fortnight, as I sat plowing through page after page of secondary literature on Victorian sexuality—my mind not off in the land of my own identity construction, but rather very much focused on the task at hand, trying to ensure that I can satisfy my advisor and myself with my synthesis of the historiography underlying the first major project that will certify me as a historian.

I have been turning a corner, all this long 2010: a year spent quietly in bedrooms and libraries and at dinner-tables, but a year I’ve spent thus because I find myself, slowly but surely, coming home. I haven’t spent so very long away, to be sure, but in my mind over the past few years I’ve been working through different ways of thinking, different ways of being, and different ways of wanting. Over this year I’ve been tying those threads together just the way I’ve been coalescing disparate historical ideas into a thesis project. I’ve been realizing that when I grow up I want to live the life I lived when I was three years old and happy, full of intellectual and imaginative pursuits and domestic, family warmth. I’ve been building homes wherever I go: little nests of coziness that stretch from British Columbia to New Jersey, from Rhode Island to California, and more besides; picking up families other than the one into which I was born; and learning to appreciate the one in which I was born more than I ever have before. In just two scarily short weeks, I’ll carry that process in a 747 over the Atlantic, and I’ll build a new home in Trinity College, Oxford. The enduring nature of my tendency to make homes means it is always heart-wrenchingly hard to leave them, and sometimes (well, most of the time) I don’t know how it is that anyone could ever conceive of the art of losing as not being hard to master. I certainly felt trying to master it reduce me to tears six months ago, when I packed into boxes one Princeton home with a window seat on the fourth floor over an archway. I certainly have begun to feel it beat upon me as I think about the grim task that awaits me when I return to reduce to boxes another Princeton home with a couch on the second floor on a quiet quad. No doubt I’ll feel it six months hence when I must reduce home to boxes again, and return to this side of the Atlantic.

But with every home I break to bits, I find myself inching closer to the home inside. I find myself becoming more grounded, more certain. When I read my books and write my words, I no longer need a parent or a professor to tell me every step of the way that I’m a precious snowflake and that I sound cleverer than any of the other snowflakes. This year, I’ve developed an inner core of self-reliance, I’ve begun to see myself as a scholar with a vocation, and I’ve begun to harden myself against the paranoid delusion that the people I love and esteem most are the ones who think I’m the stupidest. I’ve started to turn the mentoring tables, to give back to my parents actual and surrogate by adopting some charges and watching them grow into intellectually curious, discerning, humane people who care for others and for themselves with extraordinary depth. I’ve begun to understand, really, what people mean when they say they are thankful. I’ve edged closer to beginning to wrap my head around what people mean when they say they love someone. I’ve begun to guess that I’m not quite ready to read Middlemarch now, but that I will be very soon.

It is troubling, though, that with all this identification of what I have has also come identification of what I lack. 2010 has not been without its aching absences, its empty voids less immediately soul-shattering but ultimately far more disconcerting than the difficulties of saying goodbye before another move. With the other trappings of early adulthood come the sharp stabbing paralyzing fear of loneliness: if it is home for which I am looking, home for which I am headed, with whom will I share home? If I am beginning to know what it means to love, how do I say so in plain English? How can I whose province is words marshal all my verbal faculties to communicate to those who need to know—and only they—what emotional fulfillment I yearn for aside from the joy of seeing my “students” think and grow?

I don’t yet know the answers to these questions, and though it worries me how slow my progress on them seems, I do know that with time comes resolution to the crises of time itself, of growing older. I also know that the time has gone when I felt so alone that the only way I had to prevent my fears from eating away at my insides was to broadcast them to the entire internet, and I hope it has gone forever. Though I am profoundly grateful to the internet for being my lifeline when I had nothing else, I no longer need it for the same reasons. On Facebook, I communicate with many people whose names I know, for whom I care, and who care about me; via email, with its attendant .edu or .ac.uk suffix, I stay connected to the goings-on of my institution(s) of higher learning. Anonymity isn’t something I need right now—hopefully, the next time I’ll need to assume its cloak online, it’s because I’ll be up for tenure.

In March 2008, when I was a senior in high school, I so badly felt the need to teach, that I started a “People’s School” in which to do it. Its life was brief—it lasted two full-Saturday sessions—but in those two Saturdays I brought together every teenager I could convince to come to my house and teach the group something, whether it be crocheting or Beatles trivia or math games or coffee connoisseurship. I myself only taught one rather unsuccessful topic, a brief lecture and singalong on the music of the civil rights movement, which I’d improvised at the last minute because someone didn’t show. I was too nervous to debut my lecture on the history of gay activism that would in the years to come morph into a much more theoretical disquisition on how we construct politicized minority identities, and would become a dinner-table staple. But though I only partially realized it at the time, my People’s School topic was the “meta” one: my friends learned that they had the power to teach and to learn, and that intellectual engagement was valuable for its own sake, a lesson our assessment-outcomes-based high school certainly wasn’t teaching us. When I was 18 and doubted I’d get into college, much less be proud of myself when I got there, I knew what I was doing to rebel against my high school. It was the only world I knew, and I hated it. But the idea that what I was doing to empower my friends as teachers could also be empowering me didn’t really stick. Now 2010 is ending, and there have been five semesters of college, and I am spending the Christmas holiday doing original research, and through everything that I have learned in reading and writing and researching since March 2008 it’s become clear I don’t need to post on a blog to tell myself that I’ve been learning and teaching since I was three years old—and that after all these years, I’m coming home.

I started out this disquisition by saying that I don’t need this blog anymore, and I finished this disquisition on a familiar self-reflective, self-absorbed, interior-monologue note that suggests I haven’t left years of self-fashioning too far behind quite yet. So what do I mean? Well, I am going to release myself of any sense of obligation to post here; my feeling that I ought to do an end-of-the-year post, as I have every year since 2004, may be the last “assignment” I set myself. I’ll have enough of those in the coming terms, when I’ll have to produce an essay a week.

Instead, I am going to return to reading and writing about Victorian sexuality, and as the spirit moves me I will post to tell my audience how I find Oxford. Every student studying abroad needs a blog for photos and for culture shock and for the expression of surprise that after years of listening to Radio 4 and other symptoms of inveterate Anglophilia, she isn’t as inured to British culture as she might have thought. So no, I’m not going anywhere—and actually, all things said, I expect I’ll continue on very much as before. After all, I might have programmed “home” into the metaphorical GPS, but it’s still “calculating route.” I’m certainly not there yet.

Status Update

It’s exactly twelve noon on the first Saturday in December. I’m sitting on the couch, drinking my morning coffee, pretending it’s still morning. The window is surrounded with multicolored LED Christmas lights, and through its panes I can see the dully grayscale palette of stone and slate, leafless trees, and overcast sky. Last night I went to hear the Glee Club’s Christmas concert, next week is the American studies holiday party, the week after that is the Chapel Choir’s Messiah singalong, and then on December 17 at 5:30 in the morning I head northwest for my family Christmas. I’ve been doing my duty by half my ethnicity and culture, lighting the Hannukah candles night by night, but in reality it’s Christmas I’ve been dreaming about (literally); blurry twinkling images of poinsettias and paper hats and gingerbread trifle and sparkling wine keep permeating my unconscious. The temperatures are hovering in the high 30s and I’ve pulled out my shapeless brown parka to wear on my predictable circuit from home to history department to hall to library to co-op to home again. This weekend I need to put in eight-hour library days finishing a draft of my fall-term junior paper, and somehow by 5:30am on December 17 I’ll have written 30-35 pages of real, original historical scholarship. Somehow.

A lot has changed this semester, and though I haven’t written about it, I do find myself becoming a different person. Between my JP and the first stirrings of life in my thesis, my academic work has become much more real, substantial, and mature; my relationships with my various official and unofficial advisors demonstrate this. The writing I produce is no longer purely training exercises—and somehow with that sense of reality comes the melting away of some of my crippling insecurities, and comes a feeling of confidence based in the idea that if anyone has the right to go to graduate school and to use a Ph.D. for good, I certainly do. And with this comes the desire to suddenly wear many more collared shirts and v-neck sweaters and clothes that fit, and so it was that when I went to CVS last week and bought a lighter for the Hannukah candles, the cashier didn’t ask to see my ID.

In the past few days, sensing the semester drawing to a close, friends and professors have started to ask me whether I’m getting ready to go to Oxford. And I suppose I am, though I’ve barely confronted the massive logistical nightmare of packing up my belongings in just a couple days, finding homes for my furniture, and choosing which things I’ll put in my two suitcases with which to make a life across the Atlantic for seven months. But with pretension to academic adulthood comes readiness to see a new university with—quads and gates and porters’ lodges notwithstanding—more permeable borders, less geographically deterministic social lives. I’ve been consuming British television at an alarming rate, watching my British friends’ mannerisms and language more carefully than ever before, doing what I can to ease the culture shock before I go. And most importantly, I’ve been salivating over my Hilary-term reading list, preparing myself to learn all sorts of wonderful things, and thrilling at the many unscheduled hours in which I’ll have time to learn, and to start my work each day before 8pm.

I sense—in a way which was not true when I first arrived at college—that I am starting to move out of adolescence into young adulthood. There are many things about this which I do not like, and many things about which I feel uncertain, but I feel as if I’m starting to Get It, to understand how to maintain control. My life’s familiar routines shift imperceptibly: for instead of listening with wide-eyed wonder at the self-assured impartation of knowledge, it is now I who know enough to hold forth confidently at the dinner table on matters of historical, literary and queer-theoretical fact. And instead if going to parties because I feel I must, because it’s What People Do, I go to them because I want to, and I let the expenditure of energy carry me through to the next omelette in the dining hall on a sunny Sunday morning, and the next long day of synthesizing primary sources.

Between just such academic and social demands, it has taken 24 hours to finish writing even this autobiographical stream-of-consciousness of a Status Update, and it is now a sunny Sunday morning, and I am finishing my coffee, and I am in just a few minutes going to go downstairs and seek out the omelette and bagel I’ve been eating every Sunday in Princeton for two and a half years. But the real joy and comfort will come after the omelette, when I’ll lug a tote bag full of books into the bowels of the library and work an eight-hour day of writing down words which no one’s ever said before about the politicization of 19th-century American womanist thought.

In short, at 20 years old (nearly 21, I tell myself in my more optimistic moments), I have the best life and the best future prospects for which anyone in their early 20s could hope, and I’m profoundly thankful for it. “It gets better” is not just about the isolation of LGBT youth and the merits of the teleological coming-out narrative; it’s about any circumstance under which you can look at your life and love it and yourself to an extent which never seemed possible in the awful, dark days of high school. Let this stand as an object lesson in the power of the humanities to do the greatest good.

Giving Thanks

for:

A dear friend with whom to spend this most family of holidays
His house and his town, which feel like my home
My newfound ability to make pie crust
My family, who can always be relied upon to remember me even though I live thousands of miles away
Aestheticism and decadence and the day I discovered them on the wall of the National Gallery in Washington
Folk music and its attendant political and moral values
The academic discipline which makes me myself
Friends who keep me from getting trapped too far inside it
The men who a hundred and fifty years ago read Plato, telling me how to read myself
Wool blankets and wood fires
Laughter, tears, and the rest of human emotion
A life of the best mentors and teachers anyone could ask for
A stomach full of autumn fruits and vegetables
Self-reliance
The humanities and humanity
Love
Hope
Freedom
Beauty

Another Day, Another Self-Reflective Pause

When I was about twelve, I had a rich inner life as an apprentice in a guild of tradespeople, into whose society I was welcome and whose social cues I was able to intuit. I wrote many stories—even a short novel—about myself and this guild and its culture, and every day as I went through the motions of my middle-school life, a constant interior monologue transplanted those motions into the world of my guild and my apprenticeship.

This week in my historiography seminar, we read Robert Darnton’s classic cultural history The Great Cat Massacre, and we talked for three hours, in part about guilds and tradespeople and their world. My professor made a joking analogy between the world of 18th-century printers and the world of 21st-century academics, but it wasn’t until I was sitting this afternoon in a windowless storage room in the library basement, affixing Princeton University Library bookplates to shipments from Blackwells for $12.95 an hour, that my interior monologue began to shape my life according to the metaphor of apprenticeship. My cautious forays into the forms and contents of historical scholarship, my careful attention to the details of social behavior (and self-hatred when I screw up those details and the rules by which they operate), and my constant sense that I stand on the edge of a culture to which I almost-but-not-quite belong, all seem to me to have the characteristics of apprenticeship, as do the clearly laid-out steps I must take on the road to professorship and the simultaneous probability that I will drop off the path before I actually attain that goal.

I have been thinking this week about how challenging I find change, and the processes of letting go and moving on and moving away, and the way my life at times, absent any home base or sense of real rootedness, seems at times to be a constant quest for home. (We are studying the Freudian uncanny this week in my psychoanalytic theory class, but it wasn’t until I realized how I have so many unheimlich homes, and so many heimlich points of transience, that I saw beyond the immediate gothic implications of the term.) In recent months I’ve found the question “Where are you from?” harder and harder to answer, as I add to my list of experiences more and more places where I’ve felt at home for a time, and then suddenly felt sense of home ripped away from me, as it was when I left the fourth floor over the archway with its attendant window seat last June. The art of losing is very hard indeed to master, and it is just as hard to accept the lack of rootedness that comes with being in one’s early twenties and going very much through the process of trying to define who and what one is.

It is for this reason that, while bookplating this afternoon, I found the apprenticeship metaphor comforting. If each leaving of home is another step in the route back home, along the road to professorship and perhaps someday a life where I stay long enough in one place to acquire a cat or a dog and maybe even a little house, it becomes a little less terrifying and traumatizing to float all by oneself in a haze of uncertainty, constantly hovering on the outside of social situations and consumed by nervousness about plunging in. If I know that I will arrive back home someday, I can feel freer to assume a sense of agency and to pursue my own life, independent of my worries about whether anyone else thinks I’m clever or likable or good at critical theory.

And of course, since I try not to be needlessly self-indulgent in this space, I would recommend this approach to my readers, should there be any, as well—particularly those who (and I think this happens more often than we let on) see their real adult lives to bear a striking familiarity to their imaginary childhood ones.

A Brief Self-Referential Digression

I apologize for my lengthy radio silence, but when you’ve been on the go from 10:00am to 7:30pm, as I was today, and then have to come home and do homework and research, there’s not a lot of time for blogging. That said, I was moved to comment about a post on the Paris Review blog which to me makes a spurious argument. The writer, Sarah Bakewell (who, her bio explains, has written a biography of Montaigne) argues that blogging is a form of essayistic writing, and then traces a potted history of the essay which drops the names of many of the key literary figures of the recent western canon, but doesn’t entirely explain what Hazlitt and Lamb, interesting though they are, have to do with the blog.

The reason for this is simple, I think, and that’s because comparing “the blog” and “the essay” is comparing apples and oranges, or perhaps more accurately apples and the Platonic ideal of the taste of apples (I think?). “The blog” is a medium; “the essay” is a genre. In the 21st century, essays might well be published on blogs, but so might journal entries or hard reporting or political rants or requests for donations to a given non-profit. I can’t identify any particular stylistic or generic traits embodied by every single subdomain of wordpress.com, for instance, and I’ll bet that if you think about what you read online every day you couldn’t either. The New York Times‘ blogs are different from your friends’ study abroad blogs, which are different still from blogs about fashion or popular culture; I’ll bet that very few of us read on a regular basis blog posts which we could actually compare to the work of (to take one of these figures whose essays I’ve actually read) Charles Lamb. This is not to say that these blogs don’t exist, but rather that they exist amidst a wide variety of other blogs belonging to other generic categories, just as the essays Lamb or Montaigne wrote existed amidst various other parts of the world of publishing and literary dissemination in their eras.

When I first started writing a public blog in high school, I thought of myself as an essayist. I wrote about what happened in my life and what I was thinking about in ways which didn’t quite fall into the chronological here’s-what-I-did-today paradigm. But as I read real essays and realized that what I did was a great deal more self-absorbed and inward-focused than is usual for a genre which seems actually to be not only much more constructed and planned than my streams-of-consciousness, but also much more focused on the author’s relationship to the external world, I realized that what I write may be interior monologue, but it’s not really Montaignean essay at all. The use of the first person (if the essayist chooses to use the first person) does not necessarily mean that the ego, or whatever the right psychoanalytic term is, will loom large in the written piece. Rather, it seems to me as if it functions more as an entry point into an externalized set of circumstances or ideas, one with which the reader can follow along. What I write, more often than not, isn’t that; there’s too much “me” in it—though, to be sure, that “me” has receded as my style and indeed my sense of self has evolved. And, furthermore, in the most literal sense of “essay”—its root in essayer—what you read in this space does tend to represent my attempts to articulate ideas, trying them out before I would, say, let them inform the theoretical side of my academic work, or give them to a reporter for a quote in a news article. The way I understand my own blog (and again, I’d distinguish this from “blog” in general, which is still a medium capable of containing many understandings) is perhaps as a self-works-in-progress lunch talk series: regular updates of evolving intellectual identity, and requests for feedback (though I don’t, I’m sorry to say, provide sandwiches or even Diet Cokes). But though authorial voice of course looms centrally in the work of real essayists, it doesn’t rest entirely upon the ego. As we all learned in high-school English, the author’s voice is separable from the real person who lived and died; to put it into college-level terminology, biography is distinct from literary criticism. In my own writing style, however, I think I’m a little less willing to make that distinction, and I guess that’s what makes me not-an-essayist.

So, I suppose, I’ll settle for “historian-in-training.” Perhaps contrary to Bakewell’s argument, not all of we bloggers will be Montaignes or Lambs, but we can all (as can anyone, blogger or not) cultivate our own gardens and act in accordance with their own inclinations. And with that, it’s time for another radio silence. I have some 19th-century intellectual history to write.

In Which I Cultivate My Own Garden

Fellow Princetonian-turned-Oxonian-radical-academic Alex began his election-reaction blog post, in which he expresses his anger at last night’s Republican victories, by asking, “What left-leaning blogger isn’t writing one of these?” Well, dear reader. I wasn’t going to, until Alex asked. But now I feel I ought to, to explain why I wasn’t, and why (of all things) the biannual routine of elections which don’t turn out the way you’d like has restored my devotion to my own personal morals and values and motivation to work for what is right in the world.

In November 2009, when Chris Christie won the New Jersey gubernatorial election and I realized for the first time as a voting adult that politics does not tend usually to deliver record landslides for the party for which you voted, I began to articulate my desire to turn away from politics to other ways of making change. On November 4, the day after the election, I wrote, “I would like nothing more than to put politics in a box for the next ten years, and train to be the best historian that I can possibly be.” And later that day, I put into practice the trainee academic/teacher’s approach to keeping faith in the world, in a post about “rededicating ourselves to banishing hate and finding joy.” In that post, I wrote about the stalwarts of my aesthetic compass, like Walt Whitman and James McNeill Whistler, and I promised myself I would concentrate on positive values like love and beauty and not on negative angry things like party politics.

A year later, I stand in more or less the same place. My schoolwork has moved a step further towards real history and literary criticism, I’ve sought out a few more mentors and adopted a few more mentees, and I’ve added a few more writers and artists and musicians to my aesthetic compass and to my dorm-room walls and bookshelves. But a year later I still sit under the window of a gaudily neo-Gothic dormitory in the crisp November afternoon, telling myself and the world that the teacher’s daily labor of changing hearts and minds carries on, regardless of what happens in Washington. And that there is little point getting angry about Washington, because there’s so much to do to institute everything from knowledge to kindness in our lives and communities. I may only live a few hours from Washington—close enough that I’ve taken the early-morning bus down there for a protest myself—but in a day-to-day life of learning and teaching both tangible and intangible things, the wealthy mostly-men who use their personal fortunes and the support of sundry industries to propel themselves to elected office have little bearing on what we do and how we do it. They have the power to affect our material circumstances, but it’s we who must make sure we continue to bring out the best in ourselves and others. Washington has nothing to do with aesthetic appreciation and loving our neighbors. And I happen to believe, because I’m a sappy humanist, that while we need to make sure all our fellow humans are fed and clothed and housed and have healthcare and jobs and educations, we also need fight for the endurance of love and beauty and truth and hope. How can we do that if we believe that humanity’s fate lies in the hands of Congress?

And so today I spent a couple morning hours going over the election returns, but then I set about reading for my first substantial piece of independent historical scholarship. And for the first time in several weeks, I am doing this reading with the conviction that I am doing the right thing, and that I am not a total idiot, and that I deserve my place in Princeton and I deserve to go to grad school, and that what I do amateurishly mucking about with intellectual history matters as much as literary theory I can’t understand. Because what I do will keep me steeped in my vocation of teaching and learning, and that is what will keep us not just alive, but human and humane and doing right by each other.

I leave you with one of the heroes who taught me to believe in what I believe in (whose newest album, to which I’m listening this minute, should be required listening for this particular historical moment) singing a song which always gives me hope:

“better”; or, A Brief (Rather Cryptic) Meditation on Human Flourishing

It was a long, full weekend between first and second weeks. As I make a to-do list just now, at the end of Sunday night, and reflect on all the pages I haven’t yet read for this week’s classes, I think about all the things I have done in the past three days: all the hours I’ve spent talking that I might have spent reading; all the hours I spent reading that I wish I could have spent talking, had my academic demands not presented themselves so pointedly; and the strange little pieces of insight and accomplishment I snatched out of an ordinary weekend of anxiety and mounting lists as I find myself confronted by the enormity of a semester’s worth of work still to come. But this weekend I had some rewarding conversations, to be sure; and I discovered that I seem to have some sort of bizarrely unexpected talent for improvisational vegan baking (I’ve certainly never been good at anything to do with kitchens before); and I helped someone in what seemed to me to be a very small way, just with a short list of technology-related questions to which I happened to know the answers, but which in answering I came to realize stood for far greater points to be made about human nature, about human flourishing, and about how to stay strong amidst deadlines and the endless pressure that is aspiring to academic perfection.

I was there to be of technical use because I was doing my usual routine in the dining hall, eating my unhealthy food and drinking my shitty coffee and talking to everyone, and thus I was in the reach of someone who needed someone to accost in order to have his need for small technical answers gratified. And it was a joy to me to spend some Saturday afternoon in so gratifying, because for the service I rendered him he repaid me in the most heartwarming and caring grateful conversation I am sure I have ever encountered from someone to whom I’m not closely blood-related. In more hours than the ones I spent on this small task, it is this someone more than any other who has instilled in me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. It would certainly be indiscreet to elaborate further, but perhaps the title of this post will give at least some readers a clue. Suffice to say that the task I was able to complete reminded me what I have learned in the past two years about doing one’s best, being one’s best, and using both these strivings to overcome the crippling insecurity of a neurotic life on the margins of the Ivy League. Suffice to say that when I feel as if I belong at Princeton, I know whom I ought to begin by thanking.

I lay out the story of my Saturday in the vaguest of terms so that I can go on to suggest that my Saturday is entwined inextricably with Princeton itself, and with the idea of Princeton, beyond the connections which the actors in this story, its setting, or indeed any psychological drama so superficial as my “legacy complex” would suggest. I cannot help but think that no other of the places I might have gone to university would have given me a dining hall where such an encounter of social democracy could occur; I cannot help but think that the culture of no other university would permit questions of “bettering” to be the takeaway from an afternoon playing at tech support, no matter the predispositions of my anecdote’s characters to considering such questions (and reader, those predispositions: they are many).

I have been thinking recently—particularly as I completed a survey about opportunities for women’s leadership at Princeton—about this university’s struggle to remake itself. Today Princeton is an institution profoundly concerned with the desire to right its past wrongs: to bring those it previously cast to the margins into the middle, to open its ranks to all who are entitled to enter, to make all its students feel as if they are welcome and valued. I know from my experiences and those of my friends that our ivory-towered four-year home is not always so very successful at fulfilling its promise of a clean break with a reprehensibly old-boys’-club past, but to look around the university today is to see those who would not have been allowed through its gates in the past; to walk through campus today is to feel as if one no longer has to fight quite so fiercely to belong; to be involved (even as an observer) in campus politics is to become closely acquainted with and invested in the desire to be better, to transcend past sins and poor judgment calls. I feel as if it is only here—in a place preoccupied with its own history, self-regarding and self-referential enough to make the call to progressive improvement into a kind of whig-history call to prayer—that Saturday afternoon tech support could become so clearly a call to arms in the war of careful self-improvement.

For reasons not entirely related to the train of thought running through my mind while I wrestled with network settings that Saturday, I came home once all was resolved and looked up the Greek word εὐδαιμονία. Transliterated “eudaimonia,” it’s a concept central to most of the ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. It could be translated as “happiness,” or, in a formulation I really happen to enjoy, “human flourishing.” The thing is that most of the canonical ancient philosophers disagreed as to what, precisely, εὐδαιμονία entailed; most of them disagreed as to how virtuous your life need be to be εὐδαιμον. But most, it seems to me (of course, I could be entirely wrong; all I did was read a few articles online), agreed on one thing: εὐδαιμονία was an end, a moral end, an aspirational end. Nirvana, but less absolute and more subjective and as secular as you want it to be. It’s a promise, and a call. And, for me, it’s what is at the end of a life of learning and teaching: a life of the deep interpersonal relationships only pedagogy can form, wherein perhaps attaining εὐδαιμονία rests upon listening to the words of your teachers as best as you can to make yourself better, and then taking careful notes and preparing your own lectures and doing as well by your students as your teachers have done for you.

I said to someone last night—in a conversation which began with my mentioning, briefly, my role as tech support in the course of my day—that I may eat with my friends, spread out across the campus, but I couldn’t imagine, for as long as my time at Princeton lasts, living anywhere else but the college that is my home. The weight of this declaration is only just sinking in 24 hours later, as two things occur to me. The first is that this must be because I cannot think of leaving this college until I have given back to it and its students all the spirit-sustaining goodness that it has given me. The second is that if Princeton’s administration should ever need proof that it is succeeding in its efforts to right its previous iterations’ wrongs, it need look no further than my testimony. I could fail my thesis two Junes hence; I could barely pass my way to commencement and kiss an academic career goodbye, and yet my undergraduate education would still have taught me the most important thing of all: that we all, universities and their teachers and students alike, must seek to be better, to be εὐδαιμον, and to our own selves to be true.

Status Update; or, In Which I Am My Own Cheerleader and Remind Myself of a Purpose in Life

The past week has been the most difficult and most reluctant back-to-school perhaps since I started preschool eighteen years ago. Despite sleep-deprivedly lugging my bags up the hill from the train station early last Saturday and feeling as if returning to college was returning home after too long away, I’ve spent the past week feeling alienated and sort of dazed. I’ve let the internet and my reading and my sleep fall by the wayside while I dash around seeing people I haven’t seen in months, only to return home too late and find myself unable to sleep out of nervousness that my friends think I’m idiotic and uninteresting; only to pace my little bedroom (now on a tiny quad, not over an archway) and beat myself up for continuing to think it a good idea to socialize so very much instead of working. But after spending all summer grappling with the problems of motivation and doing Good Enough work as I struggled to pull some major-research-project thoughts together, I feel exhausted from the effort, and reluctant to dive into the school year. I emptied my bank account on textbooks but am sort of terrified at the thought of opening any of them. I walked away from my first class hating my stupidity; the other night, I had a meltdown—and it’s still only been a few hours more than seven days since I first set foot back on campus. I feel very tired, very fragile, and very concerned about the months of classes and extracurricular activities and social life ahead that it will take to get me through to January, when I leave for England. I feel as if I’m in a holding pattern here, waiting to leave—but I also feel as if it’s going to be a difficult four months.

I treat you to this self-pitying confessionality, however, and break my blogging silence to do so, because I think it’s useful: I know how helpful it can be to read on the internet the first-person narrative of someone struggling with the same things I do, and I am sure I can’t be the only one whose summer burnout is making the transition into term-time difficult. And, furthermore, I use it here to set up a transition, to demonstrate how one can rise above morose self-loathing to dedicate oneself and one’s energies to better things. It’s actually surprisingly simple, or at least I’ve found it so: all you have to do is remind yourself of what’s important, and what you do that is important to others and to the world at large.

This summer I didn’t live on my own in the big and weird city that is our nation’s capital. I lived at home with my family, but in a mode so very different from that which I’d adopted during high school, and so this summer was not without its own brand of personal growth and self-discovery. Some late night in July, when I’d driven my mother’s bumper-stickered station wagon full of younger friends to a 24-hour coffeeshop downtown, and we sat over espresso and half a dozen 18-year-olds were letting me Socratically question them about identity politics, I realized that while I may dream someday of being a tenured professor at a fancy-pants university, I already have a vocation and a purpose in life: I am already a teacher, I already convince by my presence, and I already have a calling which I believe it would be immoral to ignore. At twenty years old, I’m still figuring out who I am, what I want, what I need to make me content with myself, what my thesis is going to be about, whether I would make a good grad student. But all these limitations on my sense of my own adulthood (despite the fact that I live 3,000 miles away from my parents and am fast learning how to cook) needn’t limit my sense of my purpose, my value, my calling, my self- and others-worth. No matter how intimidating my seminar classmates seem, or how lonely I can feel when I come home at night, I am still a teacher. And that sense of identity isn’t going anywhere.

Last night after over two hours of dining-hall dinner-time conversation, I invited a set of kids who, when trying to think of a single adjective to describe me, settled on “pedagogical,” upstairs to my little room. They squeezed themselves onto my secondhand couch and my bed and my desk chair and my floor, and following the good example set me by my own teachers (a big part of teaching, I think, is intergenerational transfer!) I offered them tea and let my knowledge of my own work inform a freewheeling discussion about ethics. One of my kids stayed on after all the others had left, and we psychoanalyzed our friends and talked about books and art and I found myself thinking how, if the context were just slightly different, it would be me talking like this with my elders. This kid is perhaps more confident than I am, but I could see myself naming the books I wish I’d read, anxious to please my elders, my teachers. And I impressed myself with how easily the tables turn, now, as I grow older and a little smarter, and how when you’re in your second half of university you can invite the kids to your room and feed them tea and know, more or less, where you stand.

This morning I made coffee for myself with my new press-pot and sat down on my new secondhand couch and blearily worked my way through the internet. This morning I happened upon a blog post whose ideas I felt demanded that I spend twenty minutes writing a rigorous defense of the humanities, of my own identity as a humanist, and of the work that I do. As I summarized my defense in a Facebook status:

Building a more beautiful world requires scholars who love what they study and study what they love as much as it does the people who build things and the people who fix things which are broken and the people who make the trains run on time. We can’t teach people physics or statistics or life skills, but we can marshal our rhetorical and pedagogical skills and teach people to care.

Those of us who seem to have dedicated the next several years to learning to study the humanities must also dedicate ourselves to marshalling our rhetorical and pedagogical skills and teaching people to care. We must, as we learn how to think, how to read, how to write, how to speak, consider how we will tell the next undergraduate class, the next young generation, to do the same. If we are not to be the people who solve the scientific and medical and public-policy problems of the 21st century, we must be the people who remind those people that our goal, our route towards happiness, is not a wealthier world or a faster world or a more powerful world, it is a more peaceful world and a more beautiful world. It is we who must read the books so that we can tell the world what a wonderful thing it is to read books. It is we who must understand the work of writing history so that we can tell the world what a dangerous process it is to construct a narrative, and still how essential those narratives are to knowing where to find the beautiful things when you want them. It is we who must collect postcards from far-flung museums to put up as conversation pieces on our walls; it is we who must ask our parents to send us good tea from the imported-foods store; it is we who must open up our little undergraduate bedrooms to all those who come and want to talk about books and about ideas.

What I tell myself, as I prepare to embark upon a new semester’s course reading on this beautiful Saturday afternoon, is that those of us who know we are teachers need not worry about whether we are clever or successful or impressive enough. We need not feel lonely or unwanted or alienated. For even those of us teachers too young and uneducated to have our own classrooms can find students anywhere and everywhere, and every day there are people to teach, by whatever means we can find, that building a better world, a more beautiful world, is an object worth fighting for.

QOTD (2010-09-09), Pedagogical Hope-Making Edition

I just (finally) watched the film of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys. I laughed, I cried, I felt a little emotionally richer at the end, and I was particularly moved by this line, spoken by the pathetic (in the sense of pathos) “general studies” teacher Hector:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

The context of the play makes clear what is so arresting about this line: it’s not giving much away to say that Hector has at the time he delivers this line been told that he’s being fired for fondling one of his students; the boy to whom he delivers it, Posner, is starting to realize that he’s not just going through the proverbial phase. I sit here and think that there is little but the fashions and the language of the 1980s (when the play is set) to distinguish Hector’s sentiment from that of J.A. Symonds, who wrote so movingly of how, when a pupil at Harrow, he discovered Plato; who wrote so movingly to Whitman asking confirmation of the passion he saw reflected back at him from Leaves of Grass because he himself had been tortured by its intensity. It is the story of nearly every literary gay memoir in the history of literary gay memoir—and it’s why I read literary gay memoir. For whatever reasons, perhaps more reasons than I can fully identify, this sentiment is as important to me as it was to the men whom I study.

But I think it’s The History Boys, more than Symonds or Whitman or Wilde or Isherwood or Edmund White or even (though I certainly wouldn’t put him in a class with the others) Stephen Fry, which makes the point that you don’t need to be a gay man to know that literature can speak to you in a private, personal way that no other sort of encounter can manage. The play, and the film it’s become, is saturated with homoeroticism and (dare I say it) paiderastia, but it speaks to a more universal desire for knowledge, a more universal desire to teach, a more universal caring for literature, than what a gay boy’s bildungsroman of an autobiography can give those of us who have not had the very same experience, similar though our trajectories of self-doubt and growing self-awareness may be. The Special Relationship one has with the writers with whom one grew up is not a Uranian or an Arcadian thing, it’s a human thing: I too came to know myself before friends, before professors, when books were all I had. I too, when I was alone, learned through literature the words for my thoughts and emotions: Love. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Longing. Hope. And I, too, have gone off to university—an American playacting at the Oxford of Symonds, and of history boys and history girls—and while I hope I don’t end up like Hector, I do hope I shall like him thank my books for what they’ve done.

Last night I had another meltdown of fear and self-doubt, feeling unable to fulfill the requirements of becoming what I think I must become. But after watching The History Boys I feel quite inclined to consign to the trash heap of sleep-deprived nighttime insecurities my rantings and ravings about my thesis and graduate school and the job market. You don’t need all those things, or even any of those things, to be a teacher. You just need to believe that books can speak to you, and to your students, in a way that material concerns can and will not; and you need further to believe in your students and care for them at least as much as you do for your books and your sad and lonely gay men who write them. And I don’t know whether I can write a thesis or write a dissertation or write a book. I don’t know whether, if I set out to do so, I’d have anything worth saying. But I know that I love my books and that if I were allowed to talk about them for just a few hours a week, my students would love them too, would know what it is to feel a special connection with writing which has touched them.