The Long Search Party for the Final Me
I enjoyed reading this article in The Atlantic by David Brooks about late bloomers. This quote specifically:
These people [late bloomers] don’t do as much advance planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.
Reading it felt like a comeback against one of my favorite essays, which is quite negative. David Brooks celebrates the ducklings who turn into swans. But what about the ones who never do?
That’s who Seymour Krim writes about in “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business.” His essay is to everyone who believed they could be anything they set their minds to, and took it so literally they never became any one thing. He counts himself among them. Here are some of my favorite quotes from his essay (I recommend the whole essay):
“We are all victims of the imagination in this country... At 51, believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.” ... In that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13.
…
I come from America, which has to be the classic, ultimate, then-they-broke-the-mold incubator of not knowing who you are until you find out. I have never really found out and I expect what remains of my life to be one long search party for the final me.
…
It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog.
…
We cared more about trying to enlarge and extend the boundaries of being what we were, of demonically sucking all of the country’s possibilities into ourselves, than we did about perfecting a single craft or profession. As I’ve said, it was a beautiful, breathless eagerness for all the life we could hold inside, packed layer on layer like a bulging quart container of ice cream.
We forget that our contemporaries are building up wealth of one kind or another, reputations, consistency, credit in the world, and that it counts for more as age settles down around all of us, the very age we have denied or ignored. In a way, those of us who have lived higher in the mind than on the sidewalk making and revising our salad of possibilities have stayed younger than we should have. We have even been sealed off from our own image as it’s seen by others.
…
One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.
Maybe you can't tell a late bloomer from a failure until the very end. But I don’t think Krim’s people could be anything other than explorers, and I don’t think they’d want to be.