When I think about the love of study that I inherited from my dad, I worry a little bit. My dad never “did” anything with that particular superpower. And after my abortive attempt at a Ph.D. back in the 90s, I concluded that I shouldn’t try to organize my life around a smartness competition. So I didn’t “do” anything with my superpower, either, unless you count homeschooling my kids.
I’ve pretty much concluded that my dad and I never did well at organized “school” because for us, study is an artistic pursuit. It’s not suited to being controlled from above by someone else, and it’s not suited to capitalist “output.” It’s a pleasure in drinking from a firehose, so to speak, rather than executing a plan around it. It allows for, indeed insists on, rabbit holes. It thrives on that breathless feeling of realizing that damn, you knew those books were going to come in handy one day, and you scurry to your shelf to find things you bought in 1997, not knowing why you bought them at the time.
I’d been watching the NHK historical drama about Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji, and reading Leanne Ogasawara’s wonderful ruminations on the same. Then an ad popped up in my Japanese audiobook app for an audio conversation about the series, so I listened to it. After that, the app suggested a summary of Genji in simple modern Japanese, so I listened to that. It sounded like it might be an audiobook version of a Japanese middle school textbook? It not only went chapter-by-chapter through the book, but it had interesting digressions having to do with marriage rituals, women’s make-up and attire, and so on.
So when I got to my desk today, I started to browse the Japanese Amazon store for a modern version of Genji, when I suddenly remembered that my dad had a copy. Had my mother passed that on to me, I wondered. If so, it would be in the bookcase next to the piano.
Result:
Here we go, an actual photo of a rabbit hole. But it’s the end product of years of wandering through a subject. I not only had the copy of Genji that my dad had read, I had a ridiculous collection of books on the subject. And if I’d had to “produce” something based on this undisciplined menu of buying random books just because they were interesting, I would have been truly unhappy, and the output would have been questionable. In my opinion, anyway.
I remember that a course on The Tale of Genji was offered by the amazing Norma Field at my university when I was a baby Ph.D. student, but I declined to take it because I was anxious about both my Japanese ability and my ignorance of literary theory (ultimately theory is what drove me out of graduate studies! I couldn’t make any sense of it!). Professor Field was a noted scholar in Japanese literature, author of The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of Genji*, and I feel like an idiot for not getting over myself and taking the class. A good friend of mine took it and raved about it, but I was intimidated by the fact that they were actually reading the text in class. How funny that many years after putting those studies aside, I am ready to make the attempt at reading Genji in Japanese, even though I am possibly further away from the Japanese language now than I was back then.
But am I just making excuses for my lack of a Ph.D.? Maybe? Am I just undisciplined and unfocused? Maybe? I left very early in my studies, so there really wasn’t much sunk cost. It just felt terrible to be working on something I loved but to simultaneously feel stupid and under pressure to produce things that passed my own scrutiny, never mind my professors’.
Recently, I’ve been told that it’s not a good thing to engage in a boring day job and make your passion your hobby. I was taken aback by this bit of wisdom, since I’ve often given exactly this advice to my grown kids. Get a job in order to hold body and soul together, and then do what you love on the side, I told my filmmaker daughter and my English major daughter and my Ph.D. daughter.
(I have to come clean here and say that my son did the opposite and got a job in his passion, politics. But he still volunteers on the side, so maybe he sort of half-listened to me?)
But it never occurred to me that this was bad advice. Apparently we are sending the wrong message to the world when we accept dull lives focused on survival.
Our passions are important. Don’t let the bad guys win. This is what we should be saying instead.
Those of us with a) immigrant trauma, and b) no independent source of wealth, find this kind of counsel bizarre. Am I right?
I don’t think I’ve ever, not in my entire life, not even when I was a kid, thought that I could study Heian Japan and write fiction for a living. Like a real living, not a scary, precarious living.
The kinds of things that “smart kids” who are good at school are shuttled into are usually the things that make money. Medicine, law, engineering, tech. Sometimes “business” (meaning a corporate job in any number of fields). So no one ever urged me to write novels for a living. Or play instruments for a living. Or hand-sew clothes for a living. Even though I’m pretty good at all of these things.
One of my daughters graduated with high honors in a humanities field from her Very Competitive College, and when that happens you are subjected to the “what are you going to do with that degree, teach?” question. But not all humanities majors are great teachers, and in particular, resentful humanities majors are not going to be good at teaching. They’ll communicate all the wrong things about thinking and writing, which is what the humanities is supposed to give you.
As it happens, my daughter loves to teach, but as a homeschooled kid she doesn’t really love the idea of K-12 teaching, so she went in the direction of academia. But surprise, surprise, she’s found that academics mostly don’t like to teach. Many of them teach reluctantly, as an expression of trying to do work in what they love and not starve. No one wants to work a job where they are deeply angry at the things they do every day, but they are trying their best and it’s just the wrong fit. They were trying to do something they love, but ended up in something they hate mixed in with the thing they love.
I was a smart kid, but not a fantastic student. I kept looking for that “drinking from the firehouse” sensation, and this doesn’t make for good planning and discipline. But the way that I come up with anything worth writing (and indeed, reading) is in my peculiarly disorganized fashion. And if you crave chocolate but bite into meatloaf, you aren’t going to be happy.
My longing for that a-ha moment of many disparate facts coming together is so powerful, I can’t stand the thought of a plan. I really think it’s okay that I kept my cravings as pristine cravings, rather than to squash them into a commercial, salary-producing box. I think this way I still have access to joy, and I can tell people about it: Yes, joy exists! It really does. It’s there, waiting for you to find it. But in order to taste it, I had to let go of the need to monetize it.
If you’ve found a way to experience the bliss and earn money for it, that’s wonderful. But I feel like I know more people who try to do something they love, combine it with something “practical,” and then end up frustrated.
Take away the box you’ve put it in, this joy of yours. There is no shame in earning your living, in joining the economy, in producing, in taking charge when things out there go bad, in serving people, by doing something completely different. And then separately if you must, dive into the rabbit hole. Go ahead and drink from the firehose. There’s nothing like that feeling, and if I had made it my paycheck, I think I would miss it. The paycheck is fine. But the firehose is mine.
*that’s my Bookshop.org affiliate link but you can certainly find it elsewhere, it’s her dissertation, so it’s old but it’s still in print.
Sometimes when I read your post I can’t believe how similar we are I almost feel like I wrote it. People whose work and occupation is also their life passion are so lucky. But I do think it’s rare, and then I’m reading Abraham Verghese‘s new book-- medical Dr., Stanford professor, an unbelievably talented novelist? All in one life? How is that even possible? The more things that I do that are ends in themselves the better. Because there’s so many social safety nets it’s not so fraught to become an artist if you have kids because you know your children will have health care and federally managed public schools. I think it’s a much more harrowing decision in the US especially in places like California.