Yesterday my girlfriend said, “Well, you can miss a meeting, can’t you? I mean, nobody’s taking attendance. You seem anxious about it.”
I wondered, am I anxious? What keeps me coming back to this virtual place, where drunkards from everywhere—a small town south of Frankfurt, Sao Paulo in Brazil, LA, Chicago, Boston, New Bern, NC—show up every day at 7:30 AM EST to arm themselves with the immaterial weapons of sobriety? That was the question in my home group, led this morning by a 64-year old cadaverine guy who croaked his way through a thicket of AA cliches which, after five minutes, sorted themselves into a sermon, a story of how a hapless, hopeless, homeless man got sober, got married, and got religion at the age of 59.
I don’t have a good answer. I did share a story that I’ve told before, but it’s just the tip of an iceberg that won’t ever melt, no matter how warm the oceans in my mind get. It goes like this.
I got tenure at Rutgers in 1990 on the basis of the first book, Origins of the Fed, a very scholarly treatise on banking reform that has sold roughly five thousand copies since 1986 (yeah, about 140 copies annually, it’s still in print only because in times of economic crisis—in these times—people want to understand why this machine called capitalism keeps breaking down). So I was comfortably ensconced in an academic sinecure, in a great university, at the age of 40.
Except that I wasn’t comfortable. It’s a weird feeling you get from tenure. Once you’re there, they can’t fire you, they can’t tell you how to do your job—what to teach and write, or how to—they can’t make you serve on committees or attend meetings, and they can’t order you to be on campus for so many days or hours a week. “They” being your colleagues, department officers, the relevant deans, the vice-presidents of whatever, and the board of governors. You’re more or less invulnerable.
But once you’re there, you have a choice, and, may I say, it’s an existential one. You can stop trying to write your way out of the place you are, or you can start asking yourself why you wanted to write something, anything, in the first place. Not that I understood the choice just then.
In June of 1986, right after the Fed book came out, I had signed a contract with UNC Press to write a book for Alan Trachtenberg’s new series, “Cultural Studies of the United States.” So in 1990, I had something I was supposed to do, but I knew I didn’t have to. The manuscript was already overdue, of course, and I wouldn’t finish it until 1993, and at that earlier moment I had no idea how—or whether—it would end.
I was getting up at 4:30 AM to read, and think, and write that book, before the kids woke up and wanted breakfast, then the ride to school and daycare, and then classes, committees, office hours, homework or TV with the children, cocktails, cooking dinner, some reading if I had the energy. It was the only time I could carve out of the day that was mine alone. (My wife was by that time an absentee landlord, consumed with her editorial job in Manhattan: I saw her less than two hours a day.)
I was hard at work one morning before 5:00 when my son, all of five years old and already a juvenile delinquent, came down for breakfast, two hours early. Just great, I thought, this little motormouth is going to fuck up my whole fucking day. But he redeemed himself, or rather he framed the choice I didn’t yet know I was making. He wanted a bagel for breakfast, so I got out the bread knife and started slicing.
“Can I cut the bagel?” he asked. No, I said, you’d hurt yourself, this thing is real sharp, see, it’s got teeth. His eyes moved down and left—he was thinking as far into another time and place as a five-year old can—and finally said, “When you are dead, Mom will let me use the knife.” Yeah, and then you’ll be sorry, I thought, you little shit, things didn’t turn out too well for Oedipus.
I covered his slice of bagel with some cream cheese and poured him some orange juice. I got another cup of coffee and went back to work.
“What are you doing, Dad?” See what I mean, I thought, see how this day is already fucked up? I sighed, put down the pen and the book—it was Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. 1977)—and said, I’m writing a book, Vincent, it’s about pragmatism, and other stuff.
“You’re writing a book?” He was rightly mystified. Well, I’m reading this one, I said, so I can write one. You know, I’m getting ideas from this guy, and I’m gonna use them to, you know, I don’t know, have my own, some ideas of my own, I mean. That’s how books get written. You know?
He considered this at length as he chewed his bagel, so I picked up the pen, opened the book again, but then he said, “What will happen if you don’t write it?”
Without thinking I said, Well, nothing, I guess.
That’s my lame answer to my girlfriend’s question, too. It’s as good an answer as I can give her, or the people who wonder why I keep coming back to my home group—or keep writing something, anything. Nothing will happen if I don’t rouse myself and get to that meeting at 7:30. Nothing will happen if I don’t write the new book (which is once again on pragmatism).
In other words, I will leave the world just as it is, as I found it on waking. That’s a fact. But if I do go to the meeting, if I do finish the book, something might happen, something could change, maybe to me or in me, maybe to somebody else, maybe in the world. Right now there’s no way to know what will be different, or how it will make a difference, but I do know that nothing will happen if I don’t do anything.
Is it a matter of faith? Not exactly, although I can’t be certain that anything more than the possibility of making a difference waits on my exertions. Hope, then, not faith? Not really, because I know that if nothing else happens, those exertions will change me, the ways I think about and move through the world.
I suppose it comes down to the third on Paul’s list of what remains. But love of what? Well, you can’t love anybody, including your self, if you don’t love the world enough to be part of it—to be in it and of it—because that’s where everybody and everything else lives and dies. Unless you acknowledge their existence outside of and apart from you, your own existence can’t be verified. Nor would you want, or know how, to change the world.
So, what will happen if you don’t?