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Think Again
Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education
By Stanley Fish PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7340-1
CHAPTER 1
My Life Report
OCTOBER 31, 2011
Last week my colleague David Brooks made a request I couldn't refuse. He asked people over seventy to "write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not do well, and what you learned along the way." Well, here I am, reporting in.
My father was an immigrant from Poland, a taciturn, massive man who began with nothing and became a major force in the plumbing and heating industry. Once when I locked myself in the bathroom because I had done something bad — I had either set a fire under the gas tank of a car parked in a vacant lot or pushed my baby sister's carriage off the porch with her in it, I can't remember which — he knocked down the door with a single blow of his fist. My mother was a volatile woman with a fierce but untutored intelligence and a need to control everything. She and I were engaged in a contest of wills until the day she died after having, willfully, refused treatment for congestive heart failure.
We were far from well off — I still remember the eight-dollar secondhand bike I got as a birthday present; I loved it — but we were, like everyone else we knew, upwardly mobile, and that meant college, even though no one in my family had ever been there. I was not bookish; I spent most of my time playing sports badly, playing cards a little better, and lusting after girls and cars. But I was lucky, and that, I believe, made all the difference.
My first and decisive bit of luck (in addition to having parents who wanted their children to succeed) was to have had Sarah Flanagan as an English teacher in high school. It was the time when adults were asking me a terrifying question: "What are you going to be?" or, in another version, "What are you going to do with your life?" The implication was that I was not yet anything and that, unless something happened quickly, my life would come to naught.
What happened was that Miss Flanagan told me, not in so many words, that writing papers about poems was something I was good at, and since I was desperate to be good at something, I took what she said to heart and began to think of myself as someone who could at least do that.
My next bit of luck was to have had Maurice Johnson as an English teacher at the University of Pennsylvania (one of only two schools that admitted me). Johnson was an urbane man of dry wit who offered me a model of what the academic life might be like, if I could only learn to dress better and develop a taste for irony. (To this day I never get it.)
Luck followed me to Yale graduate school (where I was admitted, I was told, as an experiment; Penn was a bit below Yale's standards) in the form of three of my classmates, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Richard Lanham, and Michael O'Loughlin, men of enormous learning and literary sophistication who gave the gift of their friendship to a rube from Providence, Rhode Island. Many years later, when I met another classmate at a professional meeting, she exclaimed, "Who would have thought back then that you of all people would make it?"
The crowning piece of luck — I am still speaking only of my professional life — was to enter the job market in 1962, when higher education was expanding and everyone I knew had at least three offers at good schools. (We thought this moment would go on forever, but it never came again.) I chose UC Berkeley, in large part because my first wife was willing to go there, and found myself in a department becoming more prominent by the day; all I had to do was go along for the ride.
So that's what I did well. I arrived at places at the right time and had enough sense to seize the opportunities that were presented to me; and that continued to be the case in a succession of appointments, book projects, administrative positions, even the opportunity to write for this newspaper, which came about one day in 1995 when out of the blue someone from the op-ed page called and asked if I would write something. As usual, I didn't have the slightest idea of what to do, but I said yes anyway to this newest piece of luck.
What I didn't do so well, and haven't yet done, was figure out how to be at ease in the world. I noticed something about myself when I was married to my first wife, an excellent cook and hostess who knew how to throw a party. My main job was to dole out the drinks, which I liked to do because I could stand behind the bar and never have to really talk to anyone. ("Do you want ice with that?") My happiest moment, and the moment I was looking forward to all evening, was when the party was over and failure of any number of kinds had been avoided once again.
If you regard each human interaction as an occasion for performance, your concern and attention will be focused on how well or badly you're doing and not on the people you're doing it with. This turned out to be true for me in the classroom, on vacations, at conferences, in department meetings, at family gatherings, at concerts, in museums, at weddings, even at the movies. Always I have one eye on the clock and at least a part of the other on whether I'm doing my part or holding my own; and always there is a sigh of relief at the end. Whew, got through that one!
It may be unnecessary to say so, but this way of interacting or, rather, not interacting does not augur well for intimate relationships. If you characteristically withhold yourself, keep yourself in reserve, refuse to risk yourself, those you live with are not going to be getting from you what they need. So my first wife didn't get what she needed and neither, in her early years, did my daughter. Typically, I escaped to work and a structured environment where the roles are prepackaged and you can ride the rails of scripted routines without having to display or respond to actual feelings.
I've tried to do better in my second marriage, and I have done better with my daughter now that she is an adult who draws sustenance from other sources and doesn't need everything I don't have to give. But I'm still overscheduling myself and trying as hard as I can to make sure that I have absolutely no time for thinking seriously about life, never mind reporting on it.
And what have I learned along the way? Three things, closely related. The first is that people are often in pain; their lives are shadowed by memories and anticipations of inadequacy, and they are always afraid that the next moment will bring disaster or exposure. You can see it in their faces, and that is especially true of children who have not yet learned how to pretend that everything is all right and who are acutely aware of the precariousness of their situations.
The second thing I have learned is that the people who are most in pain are the people who act most badly; the worse people behave, the more they are in pain. They're asking for help, although the form of the request is such that they are likely never to get it.
The third thing I have learned follows from the other two. It is the necessity of generosity. I suppose it is a form of the golden rule: if you want them to be generous to you, be generous to them. The rule acknowledges the fellowship of fragility we all share. In your worst moments — which may appear superficially to be your best moments — what you need most of all is the sympathetic recognition of someone who says, if only in a small smile or half-nod, yes, I have been there too, and I too have tried to shore up my insecurity with exhibitions of pettiness, bluster, overconfidence, petulance, and impatience. It's not, "But for the grace of God that could be me"; it's, "Even with the grace of God, that will be, and has been, me."
CHAPTER 2
'Tis the Season
DECEMBER 21, 2009
For a time now I have been engaging in two activities I find it hard to think clearly about. I give talks and I give money.
I give talks about a dozen times a year, mostly at colleges and universities. I speak on a variety of topics — literature, literary theory, political theory, legal theory, First Amendment law, academic freedom, the teaching of writing, television drama. The event itself comes at the end of a lengthy process beginning with an invitation that is followed by negotiations, the fixing of a date, the making of travel arrangements, and the setting up of a schedule. By the time the talk occurs, all the parties to it have quite a bit at stake. The host institution must worry about getting up an audience, securing a room of the appropriate size, making sure that the sound system is working, coordinating transportation, finding venues for lunches and dinners.
The speaker must worry about doing a good job.
With that in mind he or she will try to learn something about the nature of the institution, the likely makeup of the audience — some audiences will regard a basic introduction of the topic as an insult while others will welcome it — the names of previous speakers in the series, the special concerns that may be animating university conversations. (Even with a lot of preparation, you never really know what you're walking into.)
The occasion is, by definition, make or break. You only get one shot. The visit is short but you leave behind an impression that will last for quite a while. You will be judged by multiple measures. Did you seem well prepared? Were you attentive to the needs of the audience? Did you present a coherent thesis supported by the relevant evidence? Did you speak clearly? Did you handle yourself well and honorably in the question-and-answer session? Were you responsive and courteous to everyone, even to those audience members who rose with the hope of handing you your head in a basket? Did you remember to thank everyone many times?
It is clearly a pressure situation, and when it is over and you are heading out of town, you will be busily assessing your own performance and asking yourself, "How did I do?"
Now comes the curious part. If I have done badly, I feel bad. No surprise there. But if I've done well (at least in my estimation), I feel worse.
Why is that? I'm not quite sure, but I have a few notions. It may be a feeling that if I had stayed around for another twenty minutes, the jig would have been up; everyone would have seen through me; I got away just in the nick of time. It may be a feeling that my success was merely a piece of theater; there was nothing of substance in it. It may be a revulsion against hearing myself say the same old thing once again; someday — maybe tomorrow — I'll run out of audiences. It may be a suspicion (actually more than that) that I am less interested in doing justice to my subject than in bringing glory to myself.
Of course, I could avoid all this by simply declining invitations; but if I did that and the word got around, I wouldn't get any more, and I would lose the sense of myself that depends on professional recognition.
It doesn't seem that I can get into a good relationship with this scene.
This is even more true of the scene of generosity. For the past three years I have spent November and part of December in new York city, where I have an appointment as a visiting scholar. In the western Catskills and Delray Beach, Florida, where I am in residence for the rest of the year, there are no homeless people (at least none you see) sitting behind makeshift signs and asking for money. Now I encounter them on every corner, and so I am always having to decide what to do.
If I don't do anything, I feel guilty. If I reach into my pocket and hand over a few dollars, I feel guiltier. I thought for a while that the problem was the amount, so I started giving more, sometimes significantly more; but that only felt like an effort to buy my way out of an imbalance between what I had and what the objects (that's the problem; I was making them into objects) of my largesse either lacked or had lost.
The accounts could never be squared. They would always be behind in resources, I would always be behind in the obligation to care for those less fortunate than I. I could just stop giving altogether, but that would seem even worse. Or I could give away all my earthly goods, but the hook of material possessions is too deeply in me for that. I could do more, but I could never do enough.
The literature I have been teaching these many years generalizes my discomfort as a performer and a giver by explaining it as a product of original sin. No deed a fallen man or woman might perform is free of what George Herbert called the "tincture of the private." Apparently selfless acts are always done in the service of the ego's enhancement. Herbert tries to write a poem that celebrates God purely, but leaves off the effort when he realizes that the object of celebration is himself: "So did I weave my self into the sense" ("Jordan II"). Andrew Marvell makes the same effort and, midway, finds it disfigured "with wreaths of fame and interest" woven by "The Serpent old" ("The coronet"). William James delivers the secular version of the same unhappy insight when he says, famously, "the trail of the human serpent is over everything."
In short, however much you try — indeed, because you try — you can't be good or do good. A hard lesson, especially in this season.
CHAPTER 3
Max the Plumber
NOVEMBER 2, 2008
My father, Max Fish, was a plumber. His uncle Frank, to whom he apprenticed, was a plumber. My brother ron was a plumber until he retired at an early age to build villas in Saint Kitts. And, as the oldest son, I was supposed to have been a plumber; my father never did quite understand what I chose to do instead.
Given these pieces of autobiography, you can understand why I have been more than slightly bemused to find that another plumber — Joe by name (although his name isn't Joe and he's not a licensed plumber) — has become a storied figure in a national election.
Max's was a better story. He emigrated from Poland with his mother and brother in 1923, at the age of fifteen. (His father, a house painter, had preceded them and sent back the money for passage.) They settled in Providence, Rhode Island, and he went to work for his uncle, carrying bathtubs three stories up on his back. In the early 1930s he married the vivacious daughter of a successful furrier. His in-laws disdained both his profession and his lack of education (he never went back to school), but in the years that followed, when the fortunes of the fur trade declined, he many times came to the rescue of my mothers' parents and siblings. He never spoke of it, but his mother was upset by this generosity. "They're bleeding my poor Max dry," she would say. My father's relationship with his uncle was always strained, and after a stint in the naval shipyards as a steamfitter in World War II, he and another plumber struck off on their own, fixing toilets and unclogging drains for other lower-middle-class householders. At some point he saw that the real money was to be found in being a plumbing contractor (the status to which Joe the plumber aspires), and he began to bid on small jobs. In 1948 he landed a (relatively) big job — $60,000 — remodeling the bathrooms and heating system of a synagogue.
One thing led to another, and in the next twenty years he became one of the largest (if not the largest) plumbing and heating contractors in three states — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The brisk narrative of the preceding sentence glosses over years of struggle and the effort of learning how to draft, how to bid (an arcane art made up of equal parts of mathematics and luck), and how to deal with contracts that require work to be completed on time but withhold payment until the state is satisfied that every detail of its myriad codes has been complied with.
(Continues...)
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