Reinvention Part One

O knit me, that am crumbled dust! The heap
             Is all dispersed and cheap;
        Give for a handful, but a thought
                   And it is bought;
                    Hadst thou Made me a star, a pearl, or a rainbow,
             The beams I then had shot
             My light had lessened not,
                    The world Is full of voices; Man is called and hurled
             By each, he answers all,
             Knows ev'ry note and call,
                    Hence, still Fresh dotage tempts, or old usurps his will.

(from Henry Vaughan's "Distraction")

It's time to find a way to either renounce what I've always thought of as my vocation in life, or to reinvest myself in pursuit of it, but in a new way that sheds all the inertia of the past several years.  

What does this mean? 

The first thing:  renovate my understanding of "virtue." That is, recover a sense of virtue as the cultivation of what is best in me--the particular set of excellences I own and am answerable to.  Developing this new and more accurate vision of virtue will allow me to act with much less fear and much less risk-aversion than I've been accustomed to.  I owe the insight to Jonathan Haidt's much-praised book The Happiness Hypothesis, which I found pleasant reading but perhaps not quite as straightforwardly scholarly as I had hoped (though it is by no means poorly researched . . . I was just looking for something written in a bit of a higher register).

That all said, I found it hard today to focus on much of anything.  Sigh. 

Monday Update, Exam Week Edition

It's the Week of Reckoning, when all those hopes for what could have happened this term come crashing down. Granted, it's worse in many ways for some of my students than it is for me, though I will admit that I find myself unusually unsettled.

In a related vein, here's something I ran across when reorganizing my books on the shelving at home:

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organizations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood, or a dream entertained as we drive along the motorway and feel our plans hovering above a wide horizon. Extraordinary resilience, intelligence, and good fortune are needed to redraw the map of our reality, while on either side of the summits of greatness are arrayed the endless foothills populated by the tortured celibates of achievement.

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

I left Symons's company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that anyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfillment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.

Alain De Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Adventures in Academe, Vol. 2