Thursday, September 5, 2019
Nobody can kick you into working if you don’t want to. It’s in what you want.
I know. Although, that always reverts to Which you?
For you, it does. For another, maybe not, for there might be no conflict. For yet another, paralysis because the conflict might be beyond resolution. Here is a nuance that perhaps we have not made clear. For some people, it is a matter of one established “I” nevertheless needing to impose its will. You accept what comes. But do you mandate that something come?
You know I don’t.
Then you must accept a certain amount of frustration. How does anyone both accept and direct?
- Some people are naturally what is called weak-willed.
- Some are relentless bulldozers.
- Some are relentless in one direction and malleable (because indifferent) in others.
- Some are mild-mannered but persistent in a low-key way.
- Some are subject to fits of suborn assertiveness alternated with long stretches of apathy or acceptance or indifference.
If we spell out these different stances, it is only to bring them actively to mind, for of course you all see these differences every day; it’s just that you may not have thought of them this way. It has been noted that quite primitive personalities may meet external success because they are entirely undivided in their intent. They set a goal and move without internal friction to accomplish it, and the results may be remarkable.
Douglas MacArthur at West Point.
Yes, that is a good example. You don’t average 98 out of 100 and graduate without a demerit if you are busy trying to overcome internal conflict.
Yet his later record was littered with official reprimands of various kinds.
His later career was not as clear-cut in its requirements as was West Point. That embodied individual will functions extremely well in situations where the rules are definite and inflexible, and expectations can be met precisely and by intent. Most of life is not like that, of course, so such a person must either impose his will upon inchoate circumstances or suffer frustrations. Or, alternatively, both.
MacArthur was superb in dangerous situations, unruly in routine ones. In World War I he was apparently unruffled in the most violent battles, appearing quite heedless of the possibility of injury or death, just like Hemingway in 1944 when he was overtaken by his renewed conviction of invulnerability.
Both, too, were men who imposed their will upon the course of their lives. MacArthur willed his way to military pre-eminence. Hemingway worked and worried his way through the somewhat formless competition and chaotic requirements of the world of commercial publishing to achieve his own preeminence. In neither case was the position at the top of the heap achieved by accepting what came. They did their best to determine what came. Hemingway spent more time and energy organizing upcoming fun with his friends than some expend on a career. That energy overflowed in him.
However, we don’t wish to give the wrong impression. Hemingway was very self-divided – to the point of internal civil war – in everything in life except his purity of devotion to the act of creation. He wanted to succeed; he worked hard to get Scribner’s to promote his books, but what was non-negotiable for him was the process itself. He came to his writing desk as a priest to the altar. For Hemingway, writing was his sacred vocation, the thing to which he was always true. To Fitzgerald, writing was a talent and skill that he parlayed into fame and wealth. It isn’t that Fitzgerald betrayed his talent (as Hemingway sometimes thought he did) but that the two men thought of writing in two complementary but different ways.
MacArthur was something between the two. He was Army to his boot tips, but he was MacArthur to those same boot tips. He did not face (if he even recognized) conflicts between the role and the profession, or between either and himself.
Have we wandered off any conceivable point, here? It feels like we have.
Perhaps we have, a little. So find us our examples. You know what we want.
In the Army, how about Bradley or Eisenhower? Both highly professional, both at the pinnacle of professional success, neither one an egomaniac. And in writing, I don’t know, Dos Passos?
Bradley and Eisenhower were modest men who were team players; they didn’t have to be the star; they concentrated on doing their job as best they could. Their will, you see, was not focused solely on their own careers and preeminence. They were not weak-willed – that isn’t how one advances up a pyramid – but their will wasn’t one-pointed. In a sense, one could say MacArthur was always at an extreme of tension; Bradley and Eisenhower were not. They were balanced in a way MacArthur was not, not that MacArthur was unbalanced, but that he was centered entirely upon one thing, in a way they were not.
Dos Passos, too, was centered differently than Hemingway. His life centered upon other things than writing as a sacred profession. He was skilled, he was serious, he was professional, but he was not a priest in the way Hemingway was. This did not make him less of a man, and perhaps nothing could have brought his prose to the level of Hemingway’s, but the difference was there. Sometimes what appears to be a matter of will (or lack of will) is actually something else. Bulldozers don’t maneuver well. Sometimes a bicycle goes places bulldozers can’t go.
A little more explicitly, please.
Everyone chooses. Life is choice, and the result of choice, and the preparation for choice. But the criteria and the goals selected make life a very different thing for different kinds of people. Some are single-pointed and are quite successful in achieving what they can conceptualize – and may be quite blind to anything else, and may be quite disoriented, even helpless, when confronted with situations outside their accustomed areas of operation. Some are diffuse, achieving no single-pointed success but enjoying a well-roundedness unimaginable (because most of the facets are invisible to them) to the one-pointed person. And some are not focused at all, or are focused by default, being shaped by the currents they find themselves in. There is room for all these in life, else life wouldn’t allow them. And so if you wish to be frustrated, there’s nothing to it: Merely measure your life by the wrong yardstick