Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Truth and Strength
Not long ago, I wrote about one of my favorite legal writers and thinkers, William Stuntz of Harvard. His sharp, incisive mind has led me to many of my own insights, and I look to his work as a guide to what I would like to do.
Among the many other things that may describe him, Prof. Stuntz is also in a struggle with Stage 4 cancer. He posted about this recently on his own blog (with David Skeel). Below is a bit of the post; you can see the whole thing here.
In short, I can’t live strong, because there isn’t much strength left in me. But I can live weak.
What does that mean? Plenty of people could answer that question better than I can. I’m a beginner at this enterprise; I’m still learning the most elementary lessons. But there is one lesson I think I’ve learned, and it’s crucial. The lesson begins with the virtue of low standards.
Low standards sound more like vice than virtue. I spent most of my working life trying to set the bar as high as possible. Aim high—even if you don’t reach the target, you’ll do more and better than you would if the target wasn’t there. The higher the bar, the better the performance. For many years, I lived by that principle, as do most of my friends in a wide range of professions. Twenty-first century Americans push ourselves, and we push hard.
Only I can’t push anymore. The bar is no longer just out of reach; it’s on a different planet than the one where I live. Not so long ago, aiming high felt like a good motivational exercise, like an effective locker room pep talk. Now, it feels like telling a paralytic he can run around the block if only he’d try a little harder: the enterprise is at once cruel and pointless, and it motivates nothing more than despair. Maybe a better way to put the point is this: All my life, I’ve tried to do my best. Now, it seems that my best is gone; it doesn’t exist anymore. So I do what I can. I try not to aim at targets, and I try not to measure myself. Some days, I can’t read or write anything serious. Some days, I can. I do what I can, when I can. The bar has disappeared.
An interesting thing happens when you put aside all the yardsticks and just do what’s possible. Motivation changes. Work is no longer about achievement and reward. It’s more about love and beauty. There is something very powerful—C.S. Lewis might have called it deep magic—about working for love of the work itself: labor becomes less labored, more gift than obligation. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to put words on a computer screen—but the ability to do it now, even if only sometimes, is more precious than I can describe. I don’t know whether that makes the work better, but I’m pretty sure it makes me better.
Likewise, there is something inexpressibly lovely—notice that word’s first syllable—about ordinary tasks done for love of the tasks, and done while in the grip of a disease that seems determined to make those tasks impossible. It’s the beauty of a runner’s last marathon, the beauty of an aging athlete’s final game, the game he pours his soul into, as the best artists do in their best work. It may not be lovely to anyone else, and that’s OK by me: cancer is an ugly disease, in every possible way. No wonder people recoil from it. But in the midst of all its life-sapping, soul-destroying ugliness, something amazing can happen: the most ordinary things, the most mundane tasks, take on value and beauty beyond anything I could have imagined. Whether or not anyone else sees it, I see it. And that’s enough.
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Yes . . . I just spent the weekend with someone who has brain cancer. He used to be a great cook, a great host. Now his hands tremble constantly and he's lost the sight in one eye. He used to plan, and lead, complicated and exotic trips all over India.
But now he's too weak to walk much beyond the house. Yet when he could, he still poured the wine, and held my chair at the dinner table, and suggested the best villages to visit where I hadn't already been. Things he could still do, most of the time. And the crippling sadness I expected to come, at seeing my friend so diminished, never came. He was still the same person, trying to do what he could do.
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But now he's too weak to walk much beyond the house. Yet when he could, he still poured the wine, and held my chair at the dinner table, and suggested the best villages to visit where I hadn't already been. Things he could still do, most of the time. And the crippling sadness I expected to come, at seeing my friend so diminished, never came. He was still the same person, trying to do what he could do.
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