Our struggle, part two

Note: Spoilers follow for the X-Files episode “My Struggle II.”

“The writers we absorb when we’re young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron,” Daniel Mendelsohn once wrote in The New Yorker. “In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.” That’s true of movies, television, and other forms of art, too, and it’s particularly powerful when it happens in your early teens. If you want to change somebody’s life forever, just find him when he’s thirteen—and give him a book. I’ve increasingly come to recognize that two-thirds of my inner life was shaped by half a dozen objects that I happened to encounter, almost by accident, during a window of time that opened up when I was twelve and closed about two years later. They included a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a movie and a television series by David Lynch, and a pair of novels by Umberto Eco. Take any of these props away, and the whole edifice comes crashing down, or at least reassembles itself into a drastically different form. And of all the nudges I received that put me on the course I’m on today, few have been more dramatic than that of The X-Files, which premiered as I was entering the eighth grade and left a mark, or a scar like that of a smallpox vaccination, that I can still see now.

I’m writing this because I’ve realized that a young person encountering The X-Files today for the first time at age thirteen, as I did, wouldn’t even have been born when the original finale aired. It’s likely, then, that there’s a version of me being exposed to this premise and these characters courtesy of the show’s revival who has never seen the series in any other form. And I honestly have no idea what that kid must be thinking right now. Aside from a miracle of an episode from Darin Morgan, the reboot has been an undeniable letdown even for longtime fans, but to new viewers, it must seem totally inexplicable. It’s easy to picture someone watching this week’s finale—which is devoid of thrills, suspense, or even basic clarity—and wondering what all the fuss was about. I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that my favorite television series, or at least the one that had the greatest impact on what I’ve ended up doing with my life, was so uneven that I don’t need to watch the majority of its episodes ever again. But to someone who hasn’t made that mental adjustment, or isn’t familiar with the heights the show could reach on those rare occasions when it was firing on all cylinders, the revival raises the question of why anyone was clamoring for its return in the first place. If I were watching it with someone who had never seen it before, and who knew how much I loved it, I’d be utterly humiliated.

I don’t think anyone, aside perhaps from Chris Carter, believes that this season gained many new fans. But that isn’t the real loss. The X-Files, for all its flaws, was a show that could change lives. I’ve written here before of the Scully effect that led young women to pursue careers in science, medicine, and law enforcement—which would be completely incomprehensible to someone who knows Scully only from her reappearance here. (Gillian Anderson does what she can, as always, but she still sounds as if she’s reading the opening narration to “My Struggle II” at gunpoint. And when she sequences her own genome in what feels like record time, I just wanted her to say that she was sending it to Theranos.) The reboot isn’t likely to spark anyone’s curiosity about anything, aside from the question of why so many people cared. And while it’s a tall order to ask a television show to change lives, it isn’t so unreasonable when you consider how it once pulled it off. The X-Files entered my life and never left it because it was clever, competent, and atmospheric; it featured a pair of attractive leads whom I’d be happy to follow anywhere; and its premise pointed toward a world of possible stories, however little of it was fulfilled in practice. It changed me because it came along at the right time and it did what it was supposed to do. The reboot didn’t even manage that. If anything, it made me retroactively question my own good taste.

I won’t bother picking apart “My Struggle II” in detail, since the episode did a fine job of undermining itself, and there are plenty of postmortems available elsewhere. But I’ve got to point out the fundamental narrative miscalculation of keeping Mulder and Scully apart for the entire episode, which is indefensible, even if it was the result of a scheduling issue. Even at the revival’s low points, the chemistry between the leads was enough to keep us watching, and removing it only highlights how sloppy the rest really was. It doesn’t help that Scully is paired instead with Lauren Ambrose, giving a misdirected interpretation of a character who isn’t that far removed from Scully herself in the show’s early seasons—which just reminds us of how much Anderson brought to that part. The episode falls to pieces as you watch it, packing a contagion storyline that could have filled an entire season into less than fifty minutes, reducing Joel McHale’s right-wing pundit, who was such a promising character on paper, to a device for delivering exposition. (Since the episode ends on a cliffhanger anyway, it could have just moved it to earlier in the story, ending on the outbreak, which would have given it some breathing room. Not that I think it would have mattered.) As the revival slunk to its whimper of a close, my wife said that I’d been smart to keep my expectations low, but as it turns out, they weren’t low enough. If the series comes back, I’ll still watch it, in yet another triumph of hope over experience. Keeping up my hopes will be a struggle. But it wouldn’t be the first time.

The road to a classical education

Last week, I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s touching account in The New Yorker of his youthful correspondence with Mary Renault, the author of The King Must Die and other novels set in ancient Greece. Mendelsohn’s tribute to her generosity is very moving, and it’s a story that I think every writer should read, if only to be reminded of how important even small acts of kindness to a fan can be, and the impact they can have on a young person’s life. Most readers will probably take the greatest interest in Mendelsohn’s discussion of how Renault’s novels, with their frank treatment of homosexuality, helped him come to terms with being gay, but I was even more struck by the fact that her books also inspired him to become a classicist. “The writers we absorb when we’re young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron,” Mendelsohn writes. “In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.”

In a sense, the choice of an undergraduate major is one of the few reasonably pure decisions most of us ever make. The process of choosing a career, especially your first job, is usually constrained by many factors out of your control, but in theory, college presents a limitless—and dizzyingly accessible—range of possibilities. I still remember the heady thrill I felt while browsing through the course catalog as a freshman, and the realization that I really could become, say, an astrophysicist, if only I was willing to put in the necessary work. Obviously, going to a good college is a privilege that not everyone can afford, and our choices are probably more limited than they seem: I probably wouldn’t have made much of an astrophysicist, or psychologist, or any of the other professions that briefly seemed so enticing. Yet it’s one of the few times in our lives when we’re at least given the illusion of being able to influence our own fates, even if we’re often too young at the time to really know what we’re doing.

Like Mendelsohn, my decision to become a classicist was informed by the books I read growing up. First among them is the D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths, a volume I all but memorized in grade school, and which I still think is one of the ten best children’s books ever written. Like all great books for kids, it draws you in at first with its surface pleasures, especially its gorgeous illustrations, only to reveal surprising depths. It’s a wise, intelligent retelling of Greek mythology without a trace of condescension, and it taught me things that came in handy years later in my college classes: I’ll never forget my pride as the only student in my section who recognized an obscure reference to the story of Tithonus, who was transformed into a cicada when his lover, the goddess Eos, asked that he be granted eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. When one of my classmates asked how I knew this, I replied simply: “From D’Aulaires.” And I wasn’t alone: I know for a fact that many of my fellow concentrators could trace their love of classical literature to the same book.

And it was only the first in a long chain of books that led me further down the same path. I have a hunch that my urge to learn Latin and Greek was subconsciously influenced by the Indiana Jones trilogy, in which a knowledge of dead languages was clearly a prerequisite, as well as by my love of such authors as Robert Graves and Umberto Eco, for whom such proficiency was a given. Later, I was haunted by John Gardner’s admonition, in The Art of Fiction, that “the really serious-minded way” for a writer to build his vocabulary was to study classical and modern languages. As a result, when I got to college, I was primed to at least take a few courses in Classics, and would probably have ended up majoring in it anyway even if I hadn’t been given an extra quixotic push by the book Who Killed Homer? But the seeds had been planted long before. My life, like Mendelsohn’s, would have been completely different if you’d taken away only five or six books that I read almost by accident. And I wear their faded scars with pride.