From Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, in the section on Florence Nightingale:

As the years passed, a restlessness began to grow upon her. She was unhappy, and at last she knew it. Mrs. Nightingale, too, began to notice that there was something wrong. It was very odd; what could be the matter
with dear Flo? Mr. Nightingale suggested that a husband might be advisable; but the curious thing was that she seemed to take no interest in husbands. And with her attractions, and her accomplishments, too! There was nothing in the world to prevent her making a really brilliant match. But no! She would think of nothing but how to satisfy that singular craving of hers to be doing something.

Reader, I can relate. So much of my life recently has been a struggle not to feel guilt for not doing enough, for not putting the greater good ahead of my emotional (and intellectual!) needs as much as I feel that I ought to. Maybe the “general will” and “duty” and “freedom of the fully rational will” in the Rousseau and Kant and Hegel I’m reading in my political theory class is getting to me; maybe it’s just that I’ve made my activist bed, and now I have to lie in it. I have to actually comply with my own exhortations to action; I’ve adopted a community, and now I have to work for it. In the space of a year, I’ve gone from sitting around a lunch table bitching about the place to actually changing it for the better.

But at the end of the day, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life lobbying and writing emails and sitting through committee meetings and talking to people and doing the logistical organizing for events. Those things are really, really important, and I’m glad that people want to do them, and I’m glad that people continue. But I want to spend the rest of my life in the classroom and the library, and honestly, I don’t think that’s too much to ask. You can satisfy your long-term emotional needs, and still be doing something too.

In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel outlines three forms of freedom (yeah, I know this is getting a little bizarre, for one of my posts. Bear with me). The first and most basic of these is the freedom of the immediate will, which is a sort of “life, liberty, property,” human-rights idea—the right to do what you want in your own home. The second is the freedom of the reflective will, which means making choices for yourself in accordance with a long-term vision of your personal happiness (e.g. if I judge that becoming a professor will bring me the greatest happiness, I should make choices that will result in my excelling at undergrad and grad school). The third, and according to Hegel, the highest form of freedom is that of the fully rational will, which holds that our freedom is embodied in the institutions of “ethical life”—the family, the state, and the civil society—and that to ensure our freedom we have to invest ourselves in and uphold those institutions, in so far as we judge them to be rational and moral (e.g. we might not have to live in accordance with a state that allows slavery, or a family structure that condones domestic abuse). However, each of these three forms of freedom builds on the others—they’re all necessary when it comes to being and acting as a free individual.

Now, this may seem like a total tangent and just a rehashing of my professor’s lecture last Thursday, and you’re probably wondering, “How does this connect back to Florence Nightingale, and what the fuck is Emily going on about?” But I’m inclined to read the Hegel like this: there is a side to living as a fully realized individual which involves acting in accordance with what will further the greater good of society and its institutions, and there is a side which involves acting in the way that will best further your own personal happiness. These are both constituent parts of Hegel’s freedom; they’re both necessary.

And so if, like Florence Nightingale, you’re going to assign a moral value to “doing something,” the best way to go about this is to ensure that “doing something” will result both in furthering your own personal happiness and the greater good. I haven’t finished the Strachey, and his take on Nightingale is obviously different from the folklore we get in school, but we learn about her today in terms of the greater good she served—not in terms of who she was as a person, and what her idea of happiness might have been. I’m not entirely sure it’s a good thing that we care so much about how selfless she was; selflessness (very obviously) implies that there is no “self.” No identity. No personhood. And if that’s what doing something entails, well frankly, I’m not too sure I want to be identifying with Nightingale and her desire to be constructive.

I went to talk with someone today about some administrative issues, and I wound up sitting in her office for over an hour ranting at her about all this stuff. (Well, I didn’t bore her with tales of Florence Nightingale and Lytton Strachey and Hegel, but the gist was the same.) It was then, taking up the poor woman’s time with my still-so-teenlike angst, that I realized I really need to get a grip. But you can babble about 19th-century intellectuals all you like, and still go to bed wondering what you’ve done all day that’s made the world a better place. My desire to become more culturally literate (as I sit in precept or at meals every day so very aware of the enormous gaps in my knowledge) is having it out in my head with my desire to become just a shell inhabited by a desire to fix the world, and it’s enough to make me want to move to Canada permanently before I explode. (In Canada, after all, we have marriage equality and much less sexism in politics and government health care and multiculturalism and French and beautiful scenery and a Conservative party that isn’t convinced that Armageddon is nigh.)

I don’t think I can keep going on like this. I feel as if one side is going to win out sooner or later—but I dread the guilt I will be consumed by when this happens, and the lingering fear that I won’t have made the right choice.

From Edmund White’s City Boy, on his first teaching gig, at Yale:

Once a week I took a train up to New Haven (a two-and-a-half-hour trip each way) to teach my twelve undergrads. I kept imagining that the students would be much better educated than I and would unmask me as a sham; after all, I thought, I’ve never read The Faerie Queene!

Of course few nineteen-year-olds, even at an Ivy League university, have read widely and deeply. They simply haven’t had enough time, especially when the admissions departments at such schools insist they be “well-rounded.” In high school they have to do some sort of community outreach, sing in the glee club, play lacrosse, work as a volunteer for their state senator in the summer, hold down a part-time job to learn the value of a dollar—and study with a tutor the rudiments of Mandarin Chinese twice a week after school. When would they find time to read Spenser or Flannery O’Connor?

This is of course so very true. I certainly didn’t read Spenser or O’Connor until university, and folks who don’t take English classes could easily get through without reading either. But in high school, I don’t think I would have had the desire to read Spenser or O’Connor; I wouldn’t have realized why it’s important to. University is good for many things, such as the mechanical process that is getting a bachelor of arts degree, and (in my case) giving one the intellectual tools one needs to be prepared for grad school. But I’ve found that the greatest thing university has done for me is to realize that there are people out there who will care if you have read Spenser or O’Connor, and people with whom you can have conversations about them. University reminded me that it is not shameful to delight in knowledge and in art.

This is something of the Theme of the Week, as you may realize. Ever since I spent Wednesday being more depressed than I’ve been in a while, I’ve been buoying my spirits by thinking of art instead of politics. Today I went to the Met for the first time in about 10 years, to look at art and appreciate the fact that there are things more profound than petty arguments (which is, really, all Washington politics is).

Without university, I might have intuited this, but I certainly wouldn’t have known it. When the only people agreeing with what you believe are related to you, you tend not to believe it. University has given me the power to get through my days not just with teeth-gritting attitudes of survival, but with rapturous delight.

I made a new sign for my wall. It says, “Seek Beauty.”