CSotD: Slogans, platforms and success
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Today's Bizarro, I regret to inform you, hit me at just the right moment to touch off a prodigious rant.
I suppose it makes the most sense to begin with the cartoon at hand and the somewhat Updikean tale of horror the fellow spins.
But Updike is the wrong author: Let's start, instead, with Charles Webb, who wrote "The Graduate" about a young fellow who doesn't know where he's going next.
Everyone loves Benjamin Braddock, which is okay, but they paint Mrs. Robinson as the villain when she's really a tragic figure and about the only person in the book or movie who knows how badly it can all turn out: An alcoholic whose artistic ambitions were cut short by a shotgun marriage to a bland, suburban striver.
His second book, also turned into a movie, pushed disillusionment only a little further down the road in "The Marriage of Young Stockbroker," in which the main character has made all the right external moves — both career and marriage — without any reference to his own needs.
This one is nowhere near as popular as "The Graduate," perhaps because, while we have no idea where Ben and Elaine are headed at the end, at least they've confronted the central conflict, while the ending of "Marriage" is "but then we realized we loved each other," a shallow, hollow faux-solution which the Robinsons might also have come up with at that stage in their lives.
So here's today's Mr. Fitz, which encapsulates this focus on making the right moves, not for the wrong reasons but for no reason at all.
Poor Lily has been led to believe that greatness is a goal in itself. If she's lucky, she'll have some sort of blow-out before she reaches Benjamin Braddock's stage, much less before she's fully installed in that great job with the great title and the great apartment in the great neighborhood.
There is something particularly sad in having no goals except achievement.
The only thing sadder is movies about women who escape bland imprisonment, assert themselves at last, and then find success in that aforementioned great job, great title and great apartment, perhaps with a dreamy guy who gets her, who really gets her.
The guy in today's Bizarro gets it, but that's not the dreamy kind that sells movie tickets.
The appeal of Pierre Bezhukov in "War and Peace" is that, at the start, he doesn't get it at all and has only the most vague, conventional sense of what constitutes success.
Once he is legally recognized as his father's heir, he has nothing to blame for failure. He faces no barriers. He is young, wealthy, well-educated and well-positioned in society.
Like Lily, all he lacks is a platform.
This description, which I've cited here before, is one of my favorite passages in all of literature:
He was always busy and always felt in a state of mild and cheerful intoxication. He felt as though he were the center of some important and general movement; that something was constantly expected of him, that if he did not do it he would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he did this and that, all would be well; and he did what was demanded of him, but still that happy result always remained in the future.
Pierre spends the bulk of that prodigious novel seeking magic ways to become what he should be, and the other characters seem to embody the blind alleys he explores and that have failed to bring any of them satisfaction, except perhaps for Vera, Natasha's elder sister, who marries a successful fellow-dullard and becomes a 19th century Yuppie.
Finally, Pierre — spoiler alert! — comes to realize that there is no magic formula and that external goals are neither the measure of success nor the source of happiness.
And if you think it takes a long novel to sort that out, wait until you see how long a life it can take.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty has an article in the current Atlantic about mid-life career change, in which the point is made that
Aristotle recognized the close connection between happiness and a sense of purpose. The good life—what the philosopher called eudaimonia—is not an easy life, but rather one filled with meaning and striving toward a goal. “We need a sense of purpose,” Wiking says.
This need, moreover, appears to grow at midlife. As the developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson observed, at some point in middle age a person begins to shift from investing inward—building a career, raising a family, buying a house, accumulating wealth and prestige—to investing outward and creating a legacy.
I sympathize with Lily: At her age, we were told success was getting into "the college of your choice," so I applied to and got into the toughest, most-prestigious college that would have me, and then I went there, because, well, that's what you do next. You go to the college of your choice.
"Your choice" being about as vague as the things Pierre felt were expected of him, the satisfaction, as for him, always being just around the next corner and dependent on making the next right choice.
The best thing that ever happened to Pierre being something he most definitely did not choose: He became a POW and was forced to march out of Russia with Napolean's defeated army, barefoot in the snow.
After the war, he finds an inward focus that neatly counters that earlier description of a younger man:
When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service, or when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the assumption that everybody's welfare depended on this or that issue of events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile … Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and some fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic, kindly old man much to be pitied.
As long as we're citing classics:
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