My Life as Doctor Faustus

I wish...

Abigail chastised me yesterday that I keep expecting every week to have a "breakthrough" moment where the inscrutability of the Core will give way to total understanding. A few hours later, I did have the breakthrough moment...and the breakthrough was that I will never have a breakthrough moment.

To explain what this means, I must also explain why I have not posted on the blog in days. Classes started this week and my second paper was assigned, and I had already decided during the all-core weeks that apart from a few predetermined social activities which would be rigidly structured, I would work. Nonstop. Rise before 7, usually 6, and go to bed after 11. Except for looking at the news in the morning, no reading for pleasure. Breaks only for meals, exercise, walking, and sleeping. I would show the world that I had a right to earn a master's degree in English through sheer mental exertion which would finally result in absolute comprehension of my class material. It got to the point where every minute spent not working, every minute idly browsing the web or otherwise, I was full of guilt for the time not spent working. I remembered Jordan telling me to get ready to stay up until 2 in the morning, remembered the exhortation in my University of Chicago Daily Planner to study as much as possible, reduce all socializing, and never waste a minute. I would fulfill these dictums.

And at first, I thought this would WORK. Sure, I felt dreadfully tired at night, but it was proof I was working hard!

Then I got the topic for my next paper, to explicate a passage from Lacan's "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." Reading the text and my notes carefully, I determined to write a great paper which would build off my own jubilant "B-" from the first paper, one which would situate Lacan's ideas in the grand psychoanalytic context I'd spent three weeks in. A first draft complete, I popped in to Abigail's office hours to ask her a question about citing Freud. Providence. It turned out I completely misinterpreted the prompt. But Abigail was more than happy to help me work through it for a few minutes.

But then my brain began to take a toll. I had spent three days working on this paper and they had been essentially wasted. Then came ninety minutes in precept group discussing Lacan, and I realized that like we the poor humans of his "Das Ding," I was chasing after something impossible to find. I'd been looking forward to social hour all week, but now I felt physically ill. Everyone kept giving me worried looks. And Abigail finally ordered me, with the same exasperation my parents feel every time I get fixated on something and can think of nothing else, to please go talk to other people about other things besides Lacan! This was our time to relax!

Then I made a mistake. I have consumed much more alcohol than I did last night on several occasions, including here in Chicago, and never felt a thing, but now the wine mixed with my stress level and after everyone had gone, I found myself collapsed onto a bench a pathetic, crying, bubbling heap of mush.

I, who will be 25 in 23 days. I, the serious student.

A wonderful girl whose name I could not tell you and Braden walked me home, and then I called my parents. A few times. And I woke up after eight hours of sleep sober and ashamed.

It was my crack-up, Fitzgerald-style, but I think a better analogy is with Christopher Marlowe's great tragic hero. Like Doctor Faustus, in my mega-ambitions I had lost sight of why I had come here to get an education in the first place.

For one thing, I had almost forgotten my passion for learning so many new things and reveling in the learning. I was now desperate for grades, desperate to not fail, desperate to use my brain to GET IT and in so doing please Abigail and David and Mark.

But I thought the point of my being here was to figure out what's going on. The truth is, nobody knows what's going on, and I think I was the last person to admit it! Everyone in the class, all my friends who are so much more articulate than me and can talk about philosophy and linguistics in ways I've not yet come close to understanding, are not trying to seize the material. They're pondering it, asking questions. I have not been doing so at all.

Hence the breakthrough moment. I'll never have a breakthrough. Lacan is not meant to be easy, and nothing else will be easy. This class is a challenge I am not predestined to win, and winning isn't even the point. They want me to think. And if I never understand some things but I can think better, that's what everyone will be happy with.

The other point. Braden and Wonderful Mystery Girl told me that they couldn't believe I was working at such a frenetic pace, Abigail found it hard to comprehend how I could spend six hours with a single Lacan essay, and Mom and Dad got ticked off that I would not let myself have fun and had even given up pleasure reading. And blog-updating (on my end). And everything else which makes my life fulfilling. Hard work is a matter of quality, not quantity.

I thought being the total academic was why I was here. But it's not. I'm supposed to be the same person I've always been, the person the people in the program are counting as a friend, the person whose teachers are praising him for being thoughtful, the person whose ambitions should never surpass how much he surrenders himself to God.

I hope God can forgive me...and Abigail as well...and I hope the people in MAPH will realize my life as Doctor Faustus is over. I am an ordinary person trying to learn things, a person who loves books and films and his faith and his friends and the well-rounded life he'll try to lead from now on.

The post-script: after some rest and recreation, I sat down and wrote a new first draft which was even better than my original paper. It's my best work yet at the University. And now I remember that my revisions to my first paper came after I took a break to play board games and watch movies, and that worked out really well! I DO need to disengage for at least a little each day. That's how I get things done. Now Peter disengaged last night as well, but he went to the movies and my favorite restaurant with our other friends instead of sobbing like a wreck for twenty minutes. I need to learn more from my roommate...