My Year With Proust - Day 12

   "'Oh, I admit,' he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical, disillusioned, and vague, 'I have every useless thing in the world in my house there.  The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this.  Always try to keep a patch of sky above you life, little boy,' he added, turning to me. 'You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 71

These are the words of M. Legrandin, a character who walks through a couple scenes early in Swann's Way.  He is an engineer, but also was known for being an unexpectedly good writer, and thus falls into that category of people who "imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted." And so, according to Proust, "they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious."

There are a couple of things that I find really interesting about this passage.  First off, is the notion of ending up in a career for which we are not fitted.  This reminds me of my old friend Bill Farrington, who I really need to call, who was my best friend in college.  He ended up getting his CPA, not because he had any great love for accounting (I'm sure there must be folks who do) but because he had a natural talent for it.  In the end it led to a very successful career and I'm sure that he has no regrets, but I can just remember having a discussion with him at the end of our time together in college and as we were launching out into the uncertainty of our careers.  Maybe I was just amazed that someone had a talent for anything, because at the time I seemed to be utterly adrift.  Having a natural talent for something, even if it gave you no great pleasure, at the time seemed like a better option than apparently having no talent for anything at all, which is essentially how I viewed myself at the time. I had devoted a couple years at Franklin to pre-Med, not because I had any passion for the field, or for science for that matter, but mainly to please my father.  In my junior year, as I was flaming out in my science course, I decided to switch to history. Even while pursuing a double major in biology and chemistry I had found time to take a stream of history classes, which I found far more fascinating than my endless hours in labs - and I also ended up getting A's in all of them.  So, I switched to pre-Law, and actually applied to a couple law schools (and I think I'm still on the wait list at IU law school).  In the second semester of my senior year I ended up applying to a couple history graduate schools, mainly because I had to do something.  Half-way through the summer the University of Cincinnati called and offered me a TA position and a free ride scholarship.  Apparently the rightful recipient of the scholarship was hit by a meteorite, which is my fanciful recreation of the event and thus is absolutely false, and thus which I completely believe to be true. I intended to kill a year and figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing with myself.  That first semester the professor I was TA'ing for took off for a semester and I had to lecture in his place, and ended up loving it - and the rest is history.  I tell that story to my students sometimes, not because it is particularly interesting, but to remind them that they probably aren't supposed to know what they want to do with their lives at 18, when Champlain pushes them to make a decision, or even at 22 when they graduate - or maybe even at 56 when you're asking Proust for help. Mainly I'm trying to get them to relax, cut themselves a modicum of slack, and maybe listen to what life is trying to tell them.

The line about the need to "keep a patch of sky above your life" also speaks to me.  And its most basic level it hearkens back to Marcus Aurelius reminding us all that "the peace of green fields is always within us."  M. Legrandin through Proust, or Proust through M. Legrandin, reminds us, "You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs."  Now the question, of course, is to ascertain what your soul needs.  Even though Proust is talking metaphorically, it could very well be a "patch of sky."  One of my first year students this last semester, as part of his self-portrait, focused on the role of art, and the mistake he had made in repressing it as part of the desire to fit in at pragmatic, sensible, career-focused Champlain, in giving his life meaning and in making him happy - which I thought was a mature and sophisticated discovery of someone of such tender years.  Conversely, your life can feed and maintain your art.  As part of this year's exploration it seems I need to figure out what constitutes my "patch of sky."  Is it family?  It probably should be, although it hasn't necessarily been in the past, which I'm sure says something bad about me.  I think I was always dedicated to my family, but that might have related more to my well-documented desire to be the stand-up guy, the one you can always depend upon, than a sincere passion for it.  My friends will joke that my dream is to end my life having everyone in the world owe me something, and me owing no one else anything; such is my mania for being considered strong and dependable; for being, and, yes, I will have to own how sexist this sounds in 2016, a man. I love my son without reservation, and I loved my first wife very much, but I also didn't fight hard enough to make a better family life or a better marriage.  And in the end was being unhappy actually part of the self-perpetuating mythology of the long-suffering man who still did what it took to get through the day?  Unpleasant thoughts for a bitterly cold January day in Vermont.  Still, you can't build anything until you create a solid foundation, and you can't create a solid foundation until you tear down the flawed structure that stood there.  Clearly, I have a lot of work to do.  Stupid Proust . . .