The Climber and the Professor
Why the sad, resistant, moody feeling this morning?
My university gave us a snow day yesterday, which clean-slated my formerly insane Thursday. My whole body felt the relief. I made use of it, cooked up some hi-cal hot chocolate with fresh whipped cream, found my way back to at least the path to book revisions. Loved watching the yellow picnic table outside my office window pile up with glorious spring snow. Then, after reading a dense but helpful academic article, I cuddled up in front of a Spanish film and happily chewed on the Madrileño accents. Didn’t leave the house all day except to shovel the sidewalk when the blizzard briefly broke.
Katie and I get to go up to Frisco and tromp around in white bounty this weekend. It’s too early in the quarter to have to grade. My mind is stimulated by the challenge of reframing the book. So I have nothing to complain about. And yet there’s this mysterious ennui, just hanging there.
We’re so obnoxious, us humans. We work so hard for things we want and then when we have them we get restless and dissatisfied. I see it in me and all around me. Nothing’s ever enough, or enough for long. Luckily, now when I become conscious of it I start practicing gratitude, and that helps reorient me and get me to sleep. Helps me get up in the morning, and start in on the same thing, different day (which in itself, I know, sounds ungrateful).
It’s all good, it’s fine. But this week I’m troubled by a couple images that have been wrestling around in my brain. Archetypes, if you will, and seeming opposites. One is an expert mountain climber, a scaler of K2 and similarly devastating, not-meant-for-human-consumption peaks. This, because I watched a Discovery Channel documentary the other night about the K2 disaster, in which 11 members of an 18-person climbing party died. (These supposed respecters of nature, by the way, leave their dead bodies all over the mountain, permanently, and for that and other reasons the whole expedition strikes me as obnoxious and rude.) So on the one hand, there’s the climber, who we generally imagine as a noble dreamer, living at the edge of human limits, all for a glimpse of the top of the world.
The second image is from a Woody Allen essay in this week’s New Yorker. It’s about a couple of Madoff investment victims who die and return as lobsters, caught and tanked in a restaurant to which the evildoer himself arrives, allowing them to launch a revenge. This set-up paragraph caught me cold:
“The Lord works in strange ways,” Moe Silverman [now a lobster] explained. “Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles.”
I had to read it twice to absorb it. Pinchuck as the hamster is basically living his Yale life all over, pedaling and smiling on a wheel. Like the rest of us. Or at least most of us.
How different, I thought, are the mountain climber and the professor, as cultural archetypes. We think of the expert climber (and he seems to think of himself) as the unconventional one, he who breaks out of the ruts of ordinary paycheck-driven existence to see what he’s really capable of. The free man, the rugged individualist, the adventurer, living in adrenaline and risk, at the edge. The professor drudges on, quarter after quarter, year after year, running on the wheel of the calendar, conducting experiments, writing up research, grading papers, sitting in meetings, standing at podiums, speaking, smiling. I think of all the mildly depressed, alienated existentialist professors in movies–Flap in Terms of Endearment, The Visitor, The Mirror Has Two Faces. He (or she) who influences lives but is not quite alive anymore. And it’s often true; I know a lot of them personally. The professor is down there at the bottom of the mountain. The climber scales hanging glaciers from the dread of such a life.
But pull in closer to the climber, and pull back on the professor. The professor is climbing; he’s become an expert. Pinchuck, at Yale, scaled treacherous mountains for the reward of each step on the tenure & promotion ladder. He uses customized tools of the trade, even had to innovate some as he went. There were plenty of times he thought he wouldn’t make it. It almost killed him (or maybe it did; he had an aneurysm). It certainly wounded his family (I think of Augusten Borroughs’ father in Running with Scissors). Everyone sacrificed for him to pull it off. His partner often felt abandoned. It was no walk in the park. Sometimes the pace was glacial, sometimes there were avalanches, and a few moments of glory, only fully appreciated by a handful of people in the world.
Come near enough to the climber, though, that you can hear his breath. He doesn’t know anything else either. When he’s not in the tent talking shop, when he’s stumbling snowblind down a 90% incline in the dark, flash frozen bodies in his wake, it’s a pointless, desperate solitude. He makes Everest, and Kilimanjaro, and even K2, but what lives in between? His wheel is the next hit; he is an addict. He’ll sacrifice everything to live for days in his own primal center, to look out from 28,000 feet, briefly, fully alive. But how is he less of a hamster? He’s “going somewhere,” when he’s on an expedition, sure, but after surviving, and after losing 9 of his toes to frostbite (as one survivor on the K2 trek did), where, now, does he go?
Are they really that different, then, or are they the same? Both seem to be to live in their own redundant loops. But both set ambitious goals, and discover deep moments of reward, of satisfaction along the way.
And these guys are privileged. What of the postal worker, the call center operator, the road paver, the single parent on food stamps? Are they better, are they worse? What of the writer, the artist? David Foster Wallace’s novel, before he died, was about people finding transcendence in the dullest of occupations, IRS tax form processors. The writer–the free man, the resister of convention, the archetype of creativity–struggles to imagine the deepest drudgery and find grace in it. But David Foster Wallace suffered debilitating depression, and he hanged himself in his studio, leaving his wife and his readers to sort out the pieces.
Okay, so this isn’t a perky post, not so much. But I think maybe it’s okay to check in about what we’re doing this for, and how to make it matter. How to not be so focused on the climb that we’ve gotten tunnel vision, but also how to step off the wheel when it matters. Something like that.
