The Executor Part 2

MOST PEOPLE, should they ever chance to spare a thought for philosophers, picture a bunch of white-haired men in smoking jackets, or perhaps togas, pulling on pipes and expounding the meaning of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. In all the best departments in this country-places like Harvard, Princeton, or NYU-philosophy bears much more similarity to mathematics. This style, which predominates at English-speaking universities, is called Anglo-American or a.n.a.lytic philosophy, and it places heavy emphasis on formal logic and argumentative clarity. Once you've read papers with as many symbols as words, it comes as no surprise that most of the great a.n.a.lytic philosophers have had backgrounds in math or hard science: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, G.o.del, Tarski, Quine, Carnap, Putnam.

Nowhere in that list are Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault. There's a reason for that: at Harvard, we don't read them. Other departments do-comparative literature, women's studies. But citing one of those names during a philosophy cla.s.s is the fastest way to get yourself laughed out of the room. They belong to contemporary philosophy's other major school, the Continentals, less a coherent group than a wild and woolly bunch of thinkers who refuse to play by the rules.

For many Continentals, the mechanics of an argument are secondary to its outcome. These writers tend to describe the world as they, as individuals, see it, and as a result they often (appear to?) eschew logic in favor of rhetoric, a.s.serting as self-evident all sorts of ideas that an a.n.a.lytic philosopher would question. When, for example, Sartre posits that the essence of our humanity is freedom, he takes for granted that freedom exists. Not so fast, says the a.n.a.lytic philosopher. We're free? Prove it. Only then can we talk about whether freedom is important. To which Sartre replies: I don't have time for your petty bullmerde. bullmerde.

The animus on each side is considerable. I remember my soph.o.m.ore tutorial leader outlining for us the rules of his favorite game: "First I name a philosopher. Then you name a worse philosopher. We each take turns, naming worse and worse philosophers, until someone says Jacques Derrida. That person loses."

I am sure that equally snide games take place in universities all across France.

In sum, Continental philosophers think that a.n.a.lytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees, and a.n.a.lytic philosophers think that Continental philosophers are unintelligible, egomaniacal morons.

Father Fred and I had read a lot of Kierkegaard and early Christian theology, as well as some existentialist fiction, works by Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevsky-which is to say, I'd mostly studied the morons, and was thus underprepared for what I faced at Harvard, so grossly that I briefly considered abandoning the concentration for something more user-friendly, English or government. But I persevered, spurred on by the notion that I couldn't, and just as I taught myself not to drop my r's r's or elongate my vowels, with practice I learned the system, coming to appreciate the crystalline beauty of the a.n.a.lytic style and winning several departmental prizes for my writing. or elongate my vowels, with practice I learned the system, coming to appreciate the crystalline beauty of the a.n.a.lytic style and winning several departmental prizes for my writing.

I had a dirty little secret, though: all the while I'd been nursing a nasty addiction to existentialism. I couldn't get away from it, especially Nietzsche, whose ideas gripped me in a way I could not easily explain. People will always argue about what he really meant, but what stood out for me was his insistence that we are radically alone-and therefore bear ultimate responsibility for creating ourselves. His concept of the ubermensch, ubermensch, so often vilified as amoral, made perfect sense to me. I had done precisely that: I had overcome, rising up out of an unread cesspool, breaking myself down, reforming myself in a mold of my own making. As senior year rolled around, and I found my professors encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D., I could not help but believe that Fate had big plans for me. Or, more accurately, that I had big plans for Fate. so often vilified as amoral, made perfect sense to me. I had done precisely that: I had overcome, rising up out of an unread cesspool, breaking myself down, reforming myself in a mold of my own making. As senior year rolled around, and I found my professors encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D., I could not help but believe that Fate had big plans for me. Or, more accurately, that I had big plans for Fate.

Thus it was that I enrolled in graduate school intending to write my dissertation on the one topic that meant most to me: free will. And d.a.m.ned if I wouldn't nail that puppy to the floor, melding existentialist fervor with a.n.a.lytical precision, forging a new mode of expression that would not only reshape a three-thousand-year-old debate but clear a new path for philosophy going into the twenty-first century. Applause, please.

Such grandiosity was misplaced. To begin with, I'm not smart enough, although it has taken me years to come to grips with that. (If I even have.) More important, I was out of sync with the times. The bitter facts of contemporary American academia are thus: one writes not to change the shape of the world but to get one's degree; one gets a degree in order to get a job; one gets a job because one must live. If one is very talented and very lucky, one catches the attention of Oxford University Press; one sells three hundred copies, all to other philosophers, and toasts oneself with a bottle of mediocre merlot.

I was naive-not to mention arrogant-to expect an exemption. Yet all the great thinkers have that presumptuous streak, a sense of the universe waiting on them. I also had a notion that scaling back my goals would be an insult to the memory of my brother, who had, directly or indirectly, set my course.

My first graduate advisor was Sam Melitsky, a lion of the department best known for his work in the exquisitely misnamed field of ordinary language philosophy. As an undergraduate I had read several of his books, coming to admire his tortured, wordy prose. His author photo showed a craggily handsome man with a stiff thatch of dark gray hair and a prizefighter's nose, one that suggested he had gone to battle for his ideas. It was a photo more than four decades out of date when we first sat down to discuss my project. By then the rugged maverick had been replaced by a kindly, doddering fellow with gaudy sprays of ear hair. I counted my blessings, though: more than tolerating my pretensions, he encouraged them. I suppose that I misstepped in trusting a man of eighty-four. He had nothing to lose by backing me. In the unlikely event that I did turn out to be a genius, he would be vindicated in his old age. If I failed, he'd be dead too soon to give a d.a.m.n.

In the end it didn't come down to that. Not exactly. What happened, rather, was this: two days after I handed in my first draft of my first chapter-a discursive, bloated thing more than one hundred seventy pages long-he had a stroke that left him unable to read or speak. The nasty but entirely predictable joke around the department had my shoddy editing as the culprit. In short order, Melitsky's daughters came to Cambridge and fetched him back to New York City, leaving me devastated and forlorn, even more so when I learned that the only person available to replace him was one Linda Neiman, logician par excellence and a legendary hard case. She loathed Sam, and me by extension. At our first meeting she shredded me, rattling off a long list of demands that would have to be met before we could have any hope of working together, starting with the requirement that I pick a new topic.

"I think I can make it work," I stammered.

"You can't," she said, and began the abuse anew.

Three years pa.s.sed in a deadlock. The more Linda denigrated my ideas, the more I overvalued them, and vice versa. She seemed to take my long-windedness and ceaseless requests for feedback as a personal attack-a fair interpretation, actually, as I was resisting her in the only way I knew how, with words, adding sentence after sentence after sentence in the hope that by piling on enough text I could get her to submit. This was a terrible strategy. She had power; I had none; the onus was on me to adapt, and my refusal to do so served only to confirm her low opinion of me. I was coddled, I was ent.i.tled, I needed a good spanking and then some. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I'll say that her att.i.tude toward me was corrective, at least in the beginning. Soon enough, though, it became punitive, and then plainly s.a.d.i.s.tic. She ignored my e-mails, restricted my teaching, blocked my grants, and poisoned my reputation. When I referred to her as my "so-called advisor," I wasn't being cheeky; the phrase was hers. "As your so-called advisor ..." she liked to begin, before drilling me yet another new one.

Several times I tried to replace her. I'd have the switch lined up, only to find the offer retracted at the last minute. The consistency with which this happened led me to believe that it was Linda herself who wanted me close at hand. Perhaps she wanted to make me an object lesson, a specimen in a jar she could take down and wave at other obstreperous students as a scare tactic.

And still I wrote. The highest praise you can give an a.n.a.lytic philosopher is that his work is perspicuous. By that measure even I could see what trouble I was in. I kept changing directions, reconsidering, restructuring. Every time I made a major revision, I saved the doc.u.ment as a new file, numbering these drafts successively. At one point I had forty-two versions of the introduction alone. I would cut a paragraph but refuse to let it go, moving it instead to a clippings file that eventually grew to twice the size of the ma.n.u.script-itself nothing to sneeze at. As the poem goes, a little learning is a dangerous thing. And ambition is a perverse master, las.h.i.+ng hardest those who bow down.

Aware that I was in way over my head, I nevertheless couldn't stop, having staked so much of my self-worth on my success. Melitsky had once written, "In large part, excellence consists of the willingness to stomach monotony." I printed that out in letters four inches high and taped it to the wall of my carrel. When I felt discouraged, I looked at those words and thought of good old Sam. All around me, my peers were toeing the line, staking out some picayune corner of the field for themselves. I scorned them, telling myself that what I was doing was not pointless but brave, clinging to the existentialist idea that one must learn not to fear solitude but to embrace it. They They wanted job security. wanted job security. I I had the courage to venture forth into the unknown. Each additional page acted like so much swaddling, helping to s.h.i.+eld me from the chill fact that I was getting nowhere. When Linda asked how had the courage to venture forth into the unknown. Each additional page acted like so much swaddling, helping to s.h.i.+eld me from the chill fact that I was getting nowhere. When Linda asked how the book the book was coming, I told her that Hegel didn't finish was coming, I told her that Hegel didn't finish The Phenomenology of Mind The Phenomenology of Mind until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had eight years. until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had eight years.

She replied that-speaking as my so-called advisor-if I wanted to read Hegel, she would gladly write me a letter of recommendation for the University of Texas.

It all came to a head one rainy day toward the end of my sixth year, when I went to Widener to do some writing and found my carrel cleaned out.

I looked back at the elevator. Had I gotten off on the wrong floor? No: there was the blue mark on the wall where I'd dropped a Sharpie. There was the deep scar that ran the length of the desktop; I had wasted hours, days, if you added them all up, tracing it with my fingertips. There was the chair in which I'd eaten, read, written, slept. This was my carrel-my home-and yet everything that identified it as mine-the Melitsky quote-all the books-not to mention the work that had gone into collecting those books-months spent poring over the catalog, cross-referencing, mining bibliographies-the tape flags and marginalia-everything-was gone.

For a moment I stood paralyzed. Then I rushed forward, as though to stanch the bleeding. There was nothing left to keep in. The sole remaining trace of me was a list of call numbers in my handwriting. I crumpled it into a ball, hurled it down the aisle, and stormed over to Emerson to confront my so-called advisor.

SHE WAS THEN in the first of a three-year stint as department chair, which meant that before I was allowed to see her, I had to contend with her idiot receptionist, Doug.

"One sec, please," he said, simpering.

While he was gone, I stole all his pens.

"Joseph. What a nice surprise."

Linda's office had been arranged to accommodate her wheelchair, all the furniture s.p.a.ced a few inches wider than normal. Even when she was sitting, her personality was such that she could still seem to tower over me. I noticed, not for the first time, that her shoes were flawless-literally unused-whereas mine looked like they'd been fished out of the trash.

"I was just finis.h.i.+ng up an e-mail to you," she said. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would."

"My pleasure. Although if you don't mind, I'm going to make myself some coffee first." She pushed her joystick, turning her back on me. By the window was a lacquered sideboard with a drip machine and several mugs. "Sit down."

I sat, dropping my bag as loudly as I could.

"You seem upset," she said. "Is there a problem?"

"The problem, Linda, is that my carrel has been emptied."

"Really," she said.

"Really."

"Hm."

"It didn't occur to you to warn me?"

"What makes you think I had anything to do with it?"

"Didn't you?"

"That wasn't my question," she said, wheeling to her desk. "The question of whether I had anything to do with your carrel being emptied is completely distinct from the question of whether you have any grounds to suggest that I did."

"For G.o.d's sake, did you did you or or did you not did you not-"

She put up a hand. "Calm down."

"What did you do? Expunge me from the records?"

"Joseph-"

"I mean, wouldn't it've been easier to have me shot, or-"

"Joseph," she said, leaning forward. "Stop it right now."

Though she spoke to me like I was a poodle, I instinctively shut up.

"Thank you. Now I'm going to read you that e-mail, and I want you to listen very carefully. Can you manage that?"

"I'm listening."

"Good." She turned to her computer, moused something open, cleared her throat.

Dear Joseph, "'It is my duty to inform you that, effective June fifth, your active student status will be suspended. Notice has been filed with GSAS and with the registrar.

"'I regret that the situation has come to this, and I hope that you will understand why the faculty has found it necessary to take such a measure.

"'We both know that your work has come to a standstill. Despite having been granted numerous extensions-extensions granted on condition that you submit work-you still have not given me, or anyone else, a single satisfactory dissertation chapter. This is unacceptable. Twice last year you failed to file applications for an academic extension. Additionally, you failed to file a tuition waiver. That in itself would const.i.tute grounds for your removal. However, the faculty and I decided to give you one more chance, and to that end I have repeatedly sent you e-mails-'"

"But that's absurd," I said. "I never-"

"'-none of which you answered. I-'"

"But I never got any-"

"I'm not finished. 'None of which you answered. I left a letter in your mailbox. This, too, went unanswered. I was therefore compelled to report to the faculty that you had grown noncompliant.

This decision will not preclude completion of your doctorate. For the time being you may retain your e-mail address, along with limited borrowing privileges. Provided you submit all outstanding coursework'"-a long stare-"'you may still qualify to graduate. However, your name will be removed from the department roster, and your active status suspended.

"'I doubt this change will affect you much, seeing as how you have already ceased to attend lectures, and have not taught in three semesters.' "

"That's because you told told me I couldn't teach anymore." me I couldn't teach anymore."

"I'm not finished, please. 'I understand that you may wish to explain to me the cause of your dereliction, and to plead your case for yet another round of extensions. You are welcome to do so. You may also appeal to GSAS. However, be aware that, having consulted Dean Blevins prior to making this decision, the faculty are not alone in considering the burden of proof to rest on your shoulders rather than ours. Our patience is thinning.

"'On a more personal note, I wish you to be aware that while I respect Sam Melitsky, I cannot and will not permit his reputation to keep you in clover indefinitely.

"'Sincerely, Linda Neiman.'"

She put her manicured hands on the desk. "Several of your cohorts are already a.s.sistant professors elsewhere. Gil d.i.c.key is at Pittsburgh. Alexi Burgher is at Stanford. Nalini, as you know, is here. As we speak, both Hudi and Irit Greenboim are interviewing at Oxford. Everyone's moved forward-except you. How do you explain that? You can't, so don't even try."

I said nothing.

"Listen," she said, adopting what she must've thought of as a gentler tone; it only made her sound more patronizing. "I'm simply saying what someone should have said to you years ago. This is not the right place for you. It never has been. I appreciate your commitment to your principles. But other people need the resources you're taking up. Just the other day I sat here with a student from Brown-with publications-looking to transfer here. What am I supposed to tell him? 'Sorry, no can do, we're saving that spot for someone.

No, hasn't produced anything of value in six years. But Sam thought he was the Next Big Thing Next Big Thing!' I mean, honestly. When does it end?"

The mortification had gone on long enough. I stood up.

"My door is always open," she said, right before it swung closed.

6.

All this carnage had one upside, and that was Yasmina.

By my penultimate year in grad school I'd run out of philosophy cla.s.ses to take and had started picking my way through the rest of the course catalog, reasoning that I was doing myself a favor by broadening my horizons. I went first to our pet subjects, math and quantum physics. n.o.body looked askance when I took an artificial-intelligence seminar. Nor did they take notice when I signed up for Greek. Film theory raised some eyebrows; but it was after I w.a.n.gled a spot in an undergraduate photography studio that my so-called advisor not-so-politely suggested that I'd veered off course.

Chastened, I next semester enrolled in a political theory cla.s.s given jointly with the law school. While meandering through the law library stacks I came across a pretty woman in a black cashmere coat, her brow furrowed in the unmistakable distress of a first-year. I asked what the problem was, and she showed me: the call numbers had switched mid-shelf. Having become something of an expert on the Harvard system, I escorted her to the right place, and she repaid me with a date.

We were halfway through dessert before she realized I wasn't a law student at all.

No, I wasn't.

"That's good. Lawyers are a.s.sholes."

I pointed out that in three years' time, she would be a lawyer.

"Then I'll be an a.s.shole," she said.

She picked up the check.

At first blush, we made an odd couple. Yasmina came from Los Angeles, where her family was prominent in the Persian Jewish community. Back in Tehran, they had owned several carpet and furniture factories, ama.s.sing a minor fortune before the Islamic Revolution forced them to flee. Servants, a chauffeur, two vacation homes-this was a life known to Yasmina only in pictures, as she had been born in Rome, where her parents lived while awaiting U.S. visas.

Once in California, her father tried to stick to what he knew, opening a furniture store with borrowed money. But he'd learned his trade on the streets and in the souk, and Americans found his aggressive brand of salesmans.h.i.+p off-putting. The store floundered, and the family suffered through moves every three months, each apartment crummier than the last. Despondent, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, he had a sign printed up that read GOING OUT OF BUSINESS-EVERYTHING MUST GO! He stuck it in the window and the inventory cleared within a week.

Now there were seven such stores, with seven such signs, scattered across the greater L.A. area, all of them going out of business continuously for the last twenty years. The Es.h.a.ghians once again lived in a big house, drove big cars, and lacked for nothing. Yet the fear of losing everything, instantaneously, clawed at them day and night. No place felt safe, no matter how democratic its elections or how free its markets. They obsessed over money: talking about it, equating it with moral worth, pestering their children to marry into it. They drove Yasmina bananas. In a sense, I owe them thanks, as it was their needling that drove her into the arms of a penniless Gentile philosopher.

But that's not giving either of us enough credit, because in fact we had more in common than met the eye. Both of us admitted to feeling like outsiders at Harvard. Having snuck past the bouncer, though, we both wanted to make the most of our time inside. We visited Walden Pond to see the leaves turn; we followed the Freedom Trail and sucked down clam chowder. On Sat.u.r.day mornings we would take long walks through the leafy neighborhoods surrounding Radcliffe Quad, stopping in at open houses to pick up tear sheets, pretending to be a young couple in search of their first home. Yasmina liked to stand in these living rooms, remodeling them in her mind-but respectfully, with an eye toward preserving the details that gave them character. Afterward we would get coffee and donuts and sit by the river, watching the scullers: pale young men moving in unison, bright boats against steely water. The Head of the Charles Regatta was by far our favorite weekend of the year. Standing there, cheering on the Crimson, we allowed ourselves the fantasy that our presence in the crowd signified more than high test scores and the need for demographic completeness; we shed our motley, inglorious pasts and became, briefly, full-fledged members of the American intellectual elite, part of a long line stretching back to John Harvard himself.

Plus, our s.e.xual chemistry was fantastic. That explains a lot.

If not for her, I would have ended up homeless much sooner than I did. I was lucky enough to meet her right before losing my standing, and while the cynical might regard my decision to move in with her as one of expedience, at the time it felt like love.

In fairness, I never took her or her support for granted. The opposite: I felt indebted and strove to justify myself by a.s.suming all the housework. I shopped for groceries. I picked up her dry cleaning. I went to the library, checked out Joy of Cooking Joy of Cooking, and read it cover to cover (knowledge whose application entailed considerable trial and error, and once triggered the hallway sprinklers). Yasmina loved to throw parties but was more or less hopeless in the kitchen, coming to rely on me and my ever-expanding culinary repertoire, which soon included Thai and Mexican, her favorites, as well as a slew of Persian dishes: kebabs, crispy rice, unp.r.o.nounceable stews.

Playing houseboy allowed me to ignore my professional collapse. More than that, though: I liked liked doing ch.o.r.es. Their simple physicality was weirdly freeing. It turns out that there is no one more mundane, no one more housewifely, than a thwarted academic. Funny-and unsettling, as I realized how easily I could have gone another route. Had I never left home, who knows what would've become of me? Office flunky, fertilizer salesman, account manager for the slaughterhouse. I began to sympathize with my mother, to understand what it's like to see one's world reduced to soups and saucepans. Martyrdom has its comforts. doing ch.o.r.es. Their simple physicality was weirdly freeing. It turns out that there is no one more mundane, no one more housewifely, than a thwarted academic. Funny-and unsettling, as I realized how easily I could have gone another route. Had I never left home, who knows what would've become of me? Office flunky, fertilizer salesman, account manager for the slaughterhouse. I began to sympathize with my mother, to understand what it's like to see one's world reduced to soups and saucepans. Martyrdom has its comforts.

And I didn't object to living in relative luxury. The fact that I paid no rent yet came home to a king-sized bed and walls filled with tasteful nautical-themed prints did not, to my mind, mean that I had sold out. I wasn't the one turning the hamster wheel. The bed, the art, the panini press-none of it belonged to me. All I had were my books, my clothes, my ideas, and half of Nietzsche. In this way, I justified becoming a yuppie.

Yasmina's disdain for her upbringing notwithstanding, at heart she's very traditional. She would roll her eyes at her family, mock their accents and their provincialism, but I knew she still loved them. (Here we have a neat demonstration of the difference between an annoying childhood and an abusive one.) Holding their conventional wisdom in inexplicably high regard, she never could manage to get over the idea that she had to be married by twenty-three or risk dying alone. Most of the women she knew, including her sisters, were, foremost, homemakers. She'd had to fight for permission to go to college out of state. Certainly n.o.body expected her to go beyond a bachelor's degree, and while her parents paid her law-school tuition, they refused to believe that she intended to work, viewing the pursuit of a career as a phase she'd grow out of once she met the right man.

I was not the right man.

I never met her family. I never spoke to them. As far as they knew, I didn't exist. Whenever a relative came to town, Yasmina would dig out an antique silver hamsa hamsa and hang it on the nail by the front door. That was my cue to pack an overnight bag and arrange a place to sleep. It was demeaning, the two of us running around trying to cover our tracks like naughty children. Banished to Drew's sofabed, I would fulminate as he threw darts and grunted sympathy. and hang it on the nail by the front door. That was my cue to pack an overnight bag and arrange a place to sleep. It was demeaning, the two of us running around trying to cover our tracks like naughty children. Banished to Drew's sofabed, I would fulminate as he threw darts and grunted sympathy.

Nor had Yasmina met my parents, who never visited me and whom I never went to visit. I'm not sure what she expected if we couldn't or wouldn't get everyone in the same metro area. That we loved each other was never in doubt. We made each other laugh; we fascinated each other with our Otherness. But we were destined to fail. We both knew it. To be honest I think we found the sense of inevitable doom rather romantic.

There was one more sticking point. Though she claimed to have fallen for my intellect, I always suspected that deep down, Yasmina had other plans for me. She sometimes referred to a nonspecific point in the future when I "stopped," the implication being that I would eventually own up to my shortcomings and find gainful employment. And if she wanted to remake me, I must confess that I sometimes felt the same way. She could be overbearingly pragmatic. I wasn't sure I ever wanted to get married, and if I did, I wondered if it could be to someone who wasn't a philosopher.

The argument that led to her throwing me out began over something insignificant. I can't even remember what it was. Isn't that the way it always is, though? It starts with a dirty plate or the default orientation of the toilet seat, and before you know it you're at each other's throats. She accused me of being distant, citing my dissertation as proof that I couldn't commit. I replied that Hegel didn't finish The Phenomenology of Mind The Phenomenology of Mind until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had six years. For a fuller explanation of what ensued, the reader is referred to chapter one. until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had six years. For a fuller explanation of what ensued, the reader is referred to chapter one.