“Roger” – pronounced the French way, soft g, long e – “was such a disappointed man.”
“He what?” I halted nonplussed. His life from what I’d seen was picture-perfect: wife, kids, grandkids, big career, popularity, respect. And quite the golfer, I understood (no golfer I). Always cheerful, amiable, busy. Enviable (I am prone to envy, alas). And that memorial service – those encomia! But I was only a friendly acquaintance, my interlocutor Roger’s best bud since college.
“If his life was a disappointment, what’s success?”
“Getting what you want,” my friend shrugged.
“Or wanting what you got,” I added sententiously (I am prone to that).
The mystery dogged me home. Different epochs set different culminations to aim at. For old Romans it was virtus; for knights, chivalry; for Victorian “gentlemen,” honor; for saints, saintliness, even martyrdom. In today’s America, it’s success, or maybe SUCCESS! in caps with an exclamation point. “Success” incorporates achievement, glamor, wealth. Celebrities, billionaires, potentates are “successes” – the guy who dies with a smile maybe not. A quiet heart may point to a deficiency of zeal.
This vision of “success” crazes many. It crazed me through my working years. Who doesn’t want to be a conspicuous winner, to be ushered by waiters to the best table, to garner attention in a crowd? Other creatures may compete to survive, but only humans preen.
I chose not to be a writer, which I loved, because the writing I loved would never bring me fame. (Poetry? Essays? Get a life, you loser!) News publishing might garner me mini-celebrity and, with luck, a pot of gold. I was seldom wretched in harness, only privately compunctious to have betrayed my dream. I only started succeeding, in my own sight, when retirement freed me to scribble to my heart’s content. Success meant shucking my cupidity for success (which I’ve done – mostly – most days). Confiding to you fulfills me as running companies never did. I thank my stars to have lived long enough to try (and to have hooked up with Jane, my heart’s redeemer).
Who owns the definition of success – the individual or their tribe? To my parents, success meant the appearance of success, what you felt didn’t matter. You donned your armor, did what you ought, maintained a stiff upper lip. To improvise was to scandalize. “Outside the box” was hors concours, repellent somehow.
My generation (the Woodstock, so called) endorsed self-fulfillment as the highest good – only we didn’t mean it. What we meant, in college, was countercultural conformity – buzzcuts, shaved women’s armpits, and ROTC need not apply! If you didn’t groove to the right tunes, you weren’t groovy, sorry pal.
My idea of success was Thoreau – or Emily Dickinson: the thrill of writing something good. Only Henry and Emily had no idea of their success – and would be surprised to hear of it. They died nobodies, oddballs, only to revive generations after, when readers caught their drift. And their genius depended on their isolation from contemporaries. They viewed existence ecstatically from the privilege of deep loneliness. Success in their neighbors’ eyes and in their own were incompatible, inconceivable. Their outside vantage was their advantage, their loss our gain.
I wondered who Roger would have been if he’d felt free to be who he dreamed. Gladder or sadder? Both, I suspect. The loftier one’s ideal, the more disheartening one’s achievement. Michelangelo and Shakespeare, I’ve no doubt, died disheartened, having envisioned so much more.
Our dog Henry (Henry T’s namesake) is happy because he doesn’t compare. In dogdom there are no successes or failures, just dogs. We humans dream of more, better, and come up short. Roger that.