on eudaimonia and sacrifice

Music: Carcrash International: Fragments of a Journal in Hell (1993)

I just got off the phone with my mother, which is sometimes both a comfort and disconcerting, today mostly a comfort but a little disconcerting. With the recent passing of my grandfather, my father (in his sixties) has been considering gastric by-pass surgery, and my mother is frightened about the "less than one percent" chance he could die from the surgery. My father is thinking about his father and quality of life issues; if he has the surgery some of the other health issues will go away. It's odd to talk with one's parents about the "rest of their years" with them, but I suppose I am glad they are thinking about happiness, and how that might be maintained or achieved in the days that shimmer ahead, slightly out of focus but with glimmering promise nonetheless.

As I was telling a friend over lunch last week---finding myself reasonably "secure" with my career and more-or-less confident I'm doing the right thing (although I've fantasized about what the second, mid-forties life-crisis career change will be)---that my focus has been more and more on making sure the home life is in order, trying to enjoy the outdoors and the garden, working on maintaining important relationships (many of which are long distance), thinking about "family" possibilities (last year was the first year that I finally admitted I wanted kids "for sure," though letting myself be open to dissuasion), and other things that the focus on career had presumably displaced. I worry sometimes that I might have passed up on romantic opportunities in the past, now that the age of 34 is upon me and everyone's getting hitched and having children. For a number of years I rebelled (somewhat angrily) against my parent's constant demand for the production of grandchildren; they've stopped making those demands in various ways. I always envisioned children "after tenure," but I realize now this was foolish (after tenure there's merit pay, and then full professorship to worry about, and so on). The disappearance of the demand is somewhat of a relief, of course, but as I approach my birthday I worry about what sort of judgments my parents have made.

I remember very vividly, nearing the end of my senior year in college, the chair of one of my programs driving me home from an NCA seminar at the Smithsonian. He said he wanted to have a hear-to-heart discussion with me about "my bright future," and proceeded to disclose a lot of inside information about working in the academy. "Do you want to be a big name?" he asked. I resolutely told him "no! I want to think for a living and teach!" He then proceeded to tell me that the life of the mind was somewhat of a Faustian bargain: if you want to think for a living, you have to be ready to "sacrifice" some part of life that would have been preserved for family. He warned that my parents and extended family would not quite understand what I did. He warned that there are few rewards for the college professor, and that culturally teachers in general are not valued.

That conversation has (obviously) always stuck with me, in part because much of what he said was true. Much of it, I'm convinced, is not (e.g., I can name many exceptions to the warning about sacrifice, many "big name" exceptions, in fact). Nevertheless, memories like this weigh in on the question of happiness, which goes hand-in-hand with "flourishing" or doing what one does well.

Embroiled in faculty discussion these past three weeks, it seems to me sometimes department dynamics (not necessarily my own) reinforce the "sacrificial" view of emotional investment---that some folks think of colleagues as something to endure, while others think of them as workplace "friend" that have a direct bearing on the pursuit of happiness. I do not like the idea that somehow a department can "socialize" a interpersonal disaster or rehabilitate them, because it slights the view I'm trying to maintain, that a schoarly life cannot be partitioned. Case in point: hiring someone because they are a "big name" or publish out the wazoo or whatever, for the prestige external to the practice of your department, at the expense of more personal things---like how annoying the person's voice is, or how arrogant they seem to behave, or how they are deceptive (but not in particularly clever ways). Why do departments, in other words, continue to hire jerks? Is it because they don't investigate the individual properly, or simply because they do not care?

Ah, the (my?) so-called Life of the Mind. I still get excited about ideas; I suppose the point is that I tend to surround myself, or at least try to surround myself, with the similarly excited. Career and emotional/family/friendly life cannot be separated. I suppose what troubles me is that all the available, default maps "out there" seem to presume this binary, that maybe I have sometimes in the past fallen into the romantic dream of self-sacrifice myself. In part, this is why it was good to escape the gravity of New Orleans.