Many years ago, I traveled with my parents back to the Land of Corn to visit relatives. While there, we stopped by the house of an older couple. While my dad talked with the husband about guns (one of the least interesting subjects in existence, IMHO), I took a look at the man’s bookshelf and noticed a copy of Plato’s Republic, which was a pleasant surprise.
What’s not so pleasant, though, is EXISTENTIAL DREAD. Thinking back to that day, I realize that I may be an old man some day, and what good will my books have done me in that regard?
For a very long time now, I’ve wanted to be smart at something, to be able to put a subject to my name, to invest part of my identity in something intellectual. It could simply be futility and arrogance, but I’ve never been able to shake the desire, for better or worse. But I also live with an unyielding practicality: what actually is the purpose of being expert at anything if death is inevitable and knowledge is laid waste by the aeons?
What I absolutely despise is the idea that I would just be some sappy book-reader who likes to annoy friends with bits of useless knowledge from time to time, while otherwise being irrelevant. Or even, for that matter, acquiring great knowledge over the course of my life, just to keep quietly to myself and eventually die. I feel like I have the verve to stand in front of a class and teach, but that requires you to have credentials and something worth teaching, and my constant flipping from one subject to another seems hardly enough to get anywhere in that respect.
This was something I was praying about recently, lamenting how I’ve just never been able to pursue a particular path. And I felt like God said, “I didn’t want to you get to this point having studied something for a decade just to feel you hadn’t gotten anywhere”. It was a bit of a shock to hear that, but it makes sense: even if I had gone on to get – I don’t know – a PhD in ancient near eastern studies, what’s to say I’d be where I am now and felt it was all worth it? I actually have a friend who very awesomely is a professor of Biblical Studies now, but no two people are the same, and life took me down the software path rather than the path of ancient cuneiform tablets (which otherwise still have a place in my heart).
But I do have a lot of money, and I quit my job, and I’m (hopefully) off toward many adventures, and it’s almost like I needed to step out of my head and experience something in life, or something like that. I’ve learned so much over the years, it’s just more broadly diversified. But I still have some angst toward that lack of specialization. The big question is: what is worth specializing in?
Right now, there’s no good answer to that. I’ve read Napoleon Chagnon’s ethnography on the Yanomamo, and I’m reading Richard Lee’s ethnography on the Dobe Ju\’Hoansi, two of the most widely known and critical ethnographies ever written, so I think I get some anthropology points for that. But I actually struggle to read long ethnographies, as they are sometimes very interesting, and sometimes very boring, so I don’t know how well-versed in ethnography I’ll ever be. I don’t believe I would ever be good at participant observation at that level, either, dedicating my whole life to the study of one group of people. It’s also interesting to note that each of those authors’ life’s work has been summarized in ~200-300 pages. Is that something I would even want?
Thanks to the WayBack Machine, I finally found the name to one of my really good anthropology professors, which I had forgotten years ago, only to learn that she really never published anything, never went on to get her PhD, and is only tangentially involved in anthropology now. Would this be my fate in academia, too?
These questions can be taken in so many directions.
And again, I wonder if it isn’t just fear of death and hubris that drives us to try to make a name for ourselves, but if you take this accusation too far, you end up scorning all victory and all accomplishment, and that’s how you end up looking back on a life of wasted potential. And that’s what I’m in the waiting room for, trying to find out. There has to be something I can accomplish, but what is worth accomplishing, and what could I realistically expect to accomplish? Could there be something more important than this, too?
“A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God”.
Waiting, waiting.