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the fear
2005-02-17 - 9:37 p.m.
I feel like I should preface this by saying that I'm not quitting and that... I don't know. I guess I want to say I believe in what I'm doing. But, ok, there's a fear, which is as follows.
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The fear is that all of the work one does in academia is produced for essentially no audience. Which is to say, there is nobody who's going to actually want to read what you produce. I feel a certain amount of interest and excitement about reading the works of "the greats", but most of everything else that's produced has almost no appeal. I don't know, but I suspect that that's how most other people in academia feel too.
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So, why do academic work at all? Either one believes that there's a decent chance one will be actually joining that pantheon of greats (ha!) or there's some other purpose that the work serves. I think for the most part that other purpose is defined in terms of egotism and careerism, and this in large part explains the large amount of junk being produced and the generally poisonous atmosphere of many, many university departments. If there isn't some broader social purpose being served by the work then the whole system turns into a great big ugly confidence trick.
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To give an example of the kind of confidence trick I mean, there's a book which I remember laughing over some years ago (I'm not sure I'd find it so funny anymore) which gives a statistical analysis of the frequency with which different words appear in the collected works of John Donne. It's got charts and tables showing how many times "the" and "and" and "a" appear and in which works and how their relative frequency changes over time... It represents a colossal amount of research work and it is of course completely without any kind of merit whatsoever. Can you imagine reading such a book? Can you imagine anyone caring about such things?
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The thought of becoming sick in the future has me... thinking about what a burden on society I've been and am going to be. Dialysis machines aren't cheap. I'm scared of being... of having to re-imagine myself as a useless person. I haven't told anyone this but after every meal I feel a certain kind of weird discomfort in my right flank... I'm worried that it's starting. I don't want to... I don't want my life to turn into a long boring story about medical ailments, you know? I need to do something good with my life. Not because... well, maybe it is because of egotism. I mean, it's going to be very humiliating one way or another... but I guess I feel like I've got this time, now, you know, I've got some vitality left and I've got some time and I don't know what it's going to be like in the future but if I'm going to create something worthwhile then I have to do it now... so much of the good parts of my life have been about books so I have to believe in them, of course, but, there are so many crummy books out there...
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Oh, it's not really unique to academia, is it? Everyone is wondering if they're leaving some important destiny unfulfilled... thinking that... you know, there's a picture of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at Yalta. Here we have three Important Men, people who had real power, at a turning point in history... does that photograph somehow become the thing that justifies the way they spent their lives? Now they've all passed on, is the soul of Stalin still in that picture?
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I think... yeah, it's about the soul of the work. I do believe it's there and I get intimations of it from time to time... but I want to be honest about that fear. The fear is most definitely there.
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"I watched you suffer
A dull aching pain
Now you've decided
To show me the same" - The Rolling Stones
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