In my dream I was a businessman again – schmoozing, plotting, hobnobbing, seducing, enticing, ingratiating, spinning – never mendaciously or vilely, I’m pretty sure – I believed, then and now, that keeping one’s nose (and balance sheet) clean was the surest route to prosperity – but a businessman, even so, committed and convinced, competitive and malcontent. Yes, I wrote – compulsively – in public and private – but “on the side” – that was my avocation, not “who I was” (the trickiest of tropes). Mine was never the familiar weepie of an artistic soul marooned in the wrong career. Was I restless in my occupation – sure, who isn’t on occasion? – but not chafing, chained. I looked forward to writing “full-time,” but that would be when the hour allowed; from my business dreams I would never irresponsibly bolt.
The moment came – and I changed – in a finger-snap. I worked like a writer – “full-time” – dreamed like a writer – fretted like a writer. Happily, I had outgrown the youthful need to conspicuously succeed, as contemporaries defined success, but I aimed for delight and sense as diligently as I had for dollars and cents. As penates I replaced Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs with, say, Shakespeare and Thoreau, but my devotion and dedication were as fierce. The impossible goal still gleamed high and sparkly in the impossible distance, beckoning, teasing in the sun.
I say, “I changed”. Did I? In schedule, mufti, concerns, efforts, dreams, yes; in some of my chums. But “I”? Who was this “I,” anyway? Is a person made by our road, or is the road irrelevant to who we “are”? This mystery – of identity – became crucial to my musings. Will the real Carll please stand up?
The other day an inquiry inkled into my inbox that would have inflamed my younger self. What a chance! Mix A with B, like an alchemist, and wow, you might transmute humble ingredients into gold! I stared at it as indifferently as puppy Henry at a tomato. No interest – curiosity – even to sniff. I returned to the sylphish (not selfish) syllables on my screen to investigate their dance.
What makes a self is an impossible calculus because you cannot repeat the experiment of existence altering one variable to compare. We are our moment, facts, fancies, fantasies, choices, accidents, nationality, neighborhood, intimates, kit and caboodle, bag and baggage, the whole nine yards. Remove from me a slightest element – what I ate (or didn’t eat) for breakfast – and the whole composition might be discomposed. What if I hadn’t reencountered Jane at the opera twenty years ago? (I almost begged off.) What if no cancer, no younger son’s sickness, a father who lived? What if, what if!
In one constant envelope I embody the mystery of happenstance. I’ve always been the baby who was born – yet for humans, more than for any other creature, there’s no telling where we end up. Far from “master of my fate,” I’ve been a passenger in a transoceanic dinghy, no maps, no quadrant, coping with wind, tides and weather best I can.
Changed? Of course I have, in countless respects. The same? That too. At this golden close of day, I sense no divorce between alien selves, no antagonism, no regret. A bright summit always gleamed impossibly distant, a glory beyond reach, a star which (as it did for the magi) justified the trek. In any human activity, there’s unattainable magnificence if you dream so far.
Call that magnificence beauty, glory, honor, grace, God, they are synonyms for the same perfection. We humans can be so, so much better than we are – yet so few dare.
Why is that?