A leap I took and a leap I didn’t (2019)

As a freshman or a sophomore in college, I remember sitting at a table in the library with an open notebook. My hand moved as if someone else controlled it, and I wrote across an empty page: I refuse to go through life just to be forgotten. Then I sat there and read that sentence. I finally crossed it out. Then I scribbled over it. Then I drew a box around the scribble and finished inking it in, over and over, until it was a black box that bled through the other side of the paper.

Maybe two years later, I am walking back to my apartment after studying at the library. It is December. I am a senior now. I stop to sit on a low wall above the sidewalk, my back against a scraggly, leafless boxwood bush. This is one of those early winter evenings in New England where it is still warm enough to sit outside for an hour. And perched on that low wall, branches poking me in the back, I decide to start. I will start trying to become a writer. I have thought about it for so long, kept it secret for so long, and now I make the decision in an instant.

I don’t decide to become a writer like someone about to start a novel. I decide it like someone who has dreamed of becoming a doctor and decides to apply to medical school. Sitting on that wall, I reflect on literature and literary history. I must prepare. I must read Homer and Virgil in the original, as well as the tragedians, and Plato, and whoever else I meet back there in time. I will do this at Oxford, and I will apply for scholarships.

Here was my grandiosity, of course. I can’t tell this story and hide that. But I am also very much a seeker, and there was something vital I wanted to understand. I was at Yale in the 1980s, when literary theory was at its frothiest and (perhaps) most arrogant. It seemed to me that something obvious and simple had been forgotten. Literature was being defined exclusively around a densely conceptual core, where only the most abstract features (something you could publish a paper on) were considered essential. Narrative and what happens when we are immersed in a story, that play of identification between a reader and a character, and above all emotion—all of this was treated as afflatus in my classes, as flotsam and jetsam. And this didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t fully explain to me why so many people had continued to read certain poems and stories for so many generations.

This was why I wanted to study Greek and Latin. I wanted to go back beyond the noise of modern literary theory to the beginning. I wanted to reflect on the appeal of literature that had been appealing for a very long time, and I wanted to learn what people needed from literature and why they kept coming back to particular pieces of writing, and I wanted to translate those principles into new narratives of my own that would help people see the world differently and live more comfortably within it. And that was my dream. It had been taking shape in my mind for many years, but suddenly there on the wall it was fully formed. And really, that is still my dream.

This story is about the first time I tried to give it up.

So I stand up from those boxwood bushes and that low wall and finish the walk to my apartment. Scholarships require an essay. I write an essay. And in that essay I announce my dream. Without any self-consciousness, I share my intensely personal, intensely literary, wildly impractical dream—forged in the adolescent experience of loss and grief and then hardened in secrecy—with an anonymous panel of judges most interested in students who promise to be senators or presidents or winners of the Pulitzer Prize. As I type up the final draft and mail the application, I am proud of the essay.

Scholarships also require references. A couple of my professors agree to write references. One asks to read the essay. I didn’t make a copy of the application, so I leave the final draft (handwritten, blue ink) in the mailbox outside his office. Next morning, there is a note in mine: Come see him in his office at noon.

He was a scholar of Milton, this professor, an educator with an intense sense of duty but little empathy. Deeply read, he was enough of a seeker himself, enough of a thinker, to have reached the limits of his own imagination. When he judged you, and he judged you often, there was something jealous and ashamed behind it. With a great show of thought and erudition, assuming facial expressions that signified sympathy, he made the same mistake that humans make in every generation regardless of their level of education: He visited his own disappointments on younger people as the necessary limitations of any life. His office was in the cellar of a residential college.

Still proud of the essay when I left it in his mailbox, I am still proud of it as I sit down in his office. His desk stands to my left. Rolling back in his chair, he returns the essay as if I composed it for him. He has written only one comment. It waits at the end—in black ink, in his small, cramped handwriting: “You are not Jesus Christ, Doug.” And now he tells me, in a way he considers compassionate, how idealistic and unrealizable my dream is. Behind him lies a daybed, neatly made. (He sleeps in his office two nights a week.) He is giving me practical advice—about applying for scholarships, about writing essays—but his compassion smokes with contempt. I smell and taste the derision. Most nauseating of all, I know he is right. Thirty years of silence will prove him right, but even at that moment I know. His limitations may not be the limitations of any life, but they will be the limitations of mine.

Door. Then the knob. Hall. Then the stairs. Sunlight. The residential college gate. The streets of New Haven. I start walking—with the blue handwritten draft still fluttering in my hand and his single comment in black ink.

Shame. Astonished, bewildered shame. Like a dream when you discover yourself in class or at work, naked from the waist down. How did I get here like this? But everyone else knows. And sees what they see. And thinks what they think. Oh, his derision and contempt still rise in my throat. Then I multiply that taste by two scholarships and the judges on two committees, all reading what I wrote. So I can’t do that? My life had one point and purpose, and now it is gone. What else can I do? Only a winter and part of a spring remains between myself and graduation. About to vomit up my dream like a meal I once enjoyed, I stare ahead down the dark and empty road of adulthood. No map. No vehicle. No pants.

I fold the draft of the essay. It travels in different pockets. I unfold it to read that one black comment. Fold it again. Different pocket. Unfold. Reread. Refold. Different pocket. Until I am standing over a city trashcan and ripping it into pieces that flutter down over soda cups and takeout bags.

I know how to get on the roof of a tall Yale building. I go there. I stand back from the edge, not wanting people on the street to see me finish thinking. The flat roof is covered with gravel, mixed with tar. I finish thinking. The edge is a low wall. I step up on the edge and look down to the street. Now I can be seen but no one sees me. I bend my knees to jump, but I don’t. I step back. I will do it differently.

I remember the shotgun at home—in the back of the drawer beneath the linen closet, behind a quilt that no one uses. It is only a mile away. I will do it there. But every street has memories. I follow my memories as I walk, making many turns. And the rage subsides. I do eventually go home. The house is empty. It is the middle of the day. I open the drawer and look at the bag that holds the gun but don’t touch it. I sit in my old bedroom for perhaps an hour. Then I walk back to my apartment on campus.

I found another way to go to Oxford. And I went. I studied Greek and Latin. I read what I wanted to read in those languages. I pursued my dream, even though I knew I couldn’t achieve it. But I couldn’t live without believing I could achieve it. Or I thought I couldn’t.