35 Discontent

After John told me that he was seeking enlightenment and that he did not want anything else but enlightenment and only enlightenment, I began myself to reconsider the entire idea and it began to make some slight sense in my head, and I became restless with intellectual excitement and with a strange kind of fear about my wasted, selfish past, and I found it hard to concentrate or completely to relax, so I was often pacing about the house in circles or thumbing idly through my index of names and telephone numbers not knowing exactly whom or what I wanted to call or why or what I might ask or say, but it seemed as if I should connect to someone or something in some psychic, mystic way about some deep, unconscious holy alliance which had been alive and growing for centuries, even millennia, while I slept.

My normal entertainments and activities became dully unsatisfying, and now I felt also vaguely unfulfilled with teaching, reading, sports, conversation, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, dining out with casual friends in pleasant restaurants, with new possessions and objects, with cars, clothes, wines, furnishings, with jokes, and with the predictable stories among acquaintances of awards, jobs, firings or potential firings, promotions, pregnancies, divorces, affairs, and even with sexual flirtations and fantasies. For the first time in my life I felt vaguely unhappy and I knew not why nor how this unhappiness had come to be, for in the past I had been always inwardly exuberant and self-loving and secretly thrilled with the everyday risks, chances, betrayals, threats, and desires of ordinary life. I felt, too, that I was a good person, acceptably moral and proper given the degree of repression, dishonesty, and hypocrisy taken for granted as a matter of course not just in academic life but also in normal, middle-class American suburban living.

I had been making progress.

I was straight-A in course work for my Ph.D. in English. I had passed the twenty-four hours of comprehensive written examinations and had also passed, with one embarrassing dissenting vote, the bizarre, surreal oral examination over the period of my specialization in American literature before which two members of my Ph.D. committee had first misled me and then asked questions of me about writers and periods they had stated I needed not review. Then I'd had approved by my advisor and the chairman of my committee the first three chapters of my doctoral dissertation on Herman Melville.

This done, I had packed my bags and gone home to the school I left two years before. I was a popular, resourceful professor, still young, and I had gone back to graduate school when I was awarded a year's pay by the institution I had served for three years. In graduate school, where my seminar papers were read and admired, my professors regularly enjoined me to publish. They praised my mastery of the conventions of academic discourse and my skeptical and ironic wit. I was expert at the prevailing academic method, which was to demonstrate and to prove, supposedly, some truth of philosophy, psychology, or literature by adducing lines and words from the text and from other, secondary exposition, all of this termed "evidence" by the scholars of the humanities and the arts, themselves locked in a vicious economic death struggle with scientists whose proofs were mathematical and practical and produced wealth and merchandise or intimidated and controlled or destroyed enemies. These key passages, lines, and words were mined from stories and poems and then set between quotation marks like precious stones, gems of evidence, like "that" and like "this," in the English prose I generated according to my professors' critical formulae. I seemed assured of a tenured, permanent, well-paying job in a private liberal arts college; or should I wish eventually to move to a large state university—and at that time I did not—yes, that, too, seemed possible. My two children were healthy and athletic, intelligent, and optimistic. My marriage was a comfortable compromise.

My life and career seemed set.

I had accepted the grim, meaningless busywork of American education, the greed and the power of academic competition; after all, I had succeeded at it, I had won and had been rewarded for my intelligence and for my wit, I was smart and good with words, shrewd, voluble, articulate, sarcastic, and I could win again.

I had embraced the lies and denials of society. These were to be deplored and lamented in the abstract and their antonyms, the hopeless ideals, rediscovered within unread classics, brought again, shining, to the light of professional scholarship, and reaffirmed. By the conventional American standard I had led a dissolute life but I was no real rebel.