Amplifying the dream

Note: I’m taking a few days off for Thanksgiving. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on August 23, 2017.

In the book Nobody Turn Me Around, Charles Euchner shares a story about Bayard Rustin, a neglected but pivotal figure in the civil rights movement who played a crucial role in the March on Washington in 1963:

Bayard Rustin had insisted on renting the best sound system money could buy. To ensure order at the march, Rustin insisted, people needed to hear the program clearly. He told engineers what he wanted. “Very simple,” he said, pointing at a map. “The Lincoln Memorial is here, the Washington Monument is there. I want one square mile where anyone can hear.” Most big events rented systems for $1,000 or $2,000, but Rustin wanted to spend ten times that. Other members of the march committee were skeptical about the need for a deluxe system. “We cannot maintain order where people cannot hear,” Rustin said. If the Mall was jammed with people baking in the sun, waiting in long lines for portable toilets, anything could happen. Rustin’s job was to control the crowd. “In my view it was a classic resolution of the problem of how can you keep a crowd from becoming something else,” he said. “Transform it into an audience.”

Ultimately, Rustin was able to convince the United Auto Workers and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Unions to raise twenty thousand dollars for the sound system. (When he was informed that it ought to be possible to do it for less, he replied: “Not for what I want.”) The company American Amplifier and Television landed the contract, and after the system was sabotaged by persons unknown the night before the march, Walter Fauntroy, who was in charge of operations on the ground, called Attorney General Robert Kennedy with a warning: “We have a serious problem. We have a couple hundred thousand people coming. Do you want a fight here tomorrow after all we’ve done?”

The system was fixed just in time, and its importance on that day is hard to overstate. As Zeynep Tufekci writes in her recent book Twitter and Tear Gas: “Rustin knew that without a focused way to communicate with the massive crowd and to keep things orderly, much could go wrong…The sound system worked without a hitch during the day of the march, playing just the role Rustin had imagined: all the participants could hear exactly what was going on, hear instructions needed to keep things orderly, and feel connected to the whole march.” But its impact on our collective memory of the event may have been even more profound. In an article last year in The New Yorker, which is where I first encountered the story, Nathan Heller notes in a discussion of Tufekci’s work:

Before the march, Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered variations on his “I Have a Dream” speech twice in public. He had given a longer version to a group of two thousand people in North Carolina. And he had presented a second variation, earlier in the summer, before a vast crowd of a hundred thousand at a march in Detroit. The reason we remember only the Washington, D.C., version, Tufekci argues, has to do with the strategic vision and attentive detail work of people like Rustin. Framed by the Lincoln Memorial, amplified by a fancy sound system, delivered before a thousand-person press bay with good camera sight lines, King’s performance came across as something more than what it had been in Detroit—it was the announcement of a shift in national mood, the fulcrum of a movement’s story line and power. It became, in other words, the rarest of protest performances: the kind through which American history can change.

Heller concludes that successful protest movements hinge on the existence of organized, flexible, practical structures with access to elites. After noting that the sound system was repaired, on Kennedy’s orders, by the Army Corps of Engineers, he observes: “You can’t get much cozier with the Man than that.”

There’s another side to the story, however, which neither Tufekci or Heller mention. In his memoir Behind the Dream, the activist Clarence B. Jones recalls:

The Justice Department and the police had worked hand in hand with the March Committee to design a public address system powerful enough to get the speakers’ voices across the Mall; what march coordinators wouldn’t learn until after the event had ended was that the government had built in a bypass to the system so that they could instantly take over control if they deemed it necessary…Ted [Brown] and Bayard [Rustin] told us that right after the march ended those officers approached them, eager to relieve their consciences and reveal the truth about the sound system. There was a kill switch and an administration official’s thumb had been on it the entire time.

The journalist Gary Younge—whose primary source seems to be Jones—expands on this claim in his book The Speech: “Fearing incitement from the podium, the Justice Department secretly inserted a cutoff switch into the sound system so they could turn off the speakers if an insurgent group hijacked the microphone. In such an eventuality, the plan was to play a recording to Mahalia Jackson singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ in order to calm down the crowd.” In Pillar of Fire, Taylor Branch identifies the official in question as Jerry Bruno, President Kennedy’s “advance man,” who “positioned himself to cut the power to the public address system if rally speeches proved incendiary.” Regardless of the details, the existence of this cutoff switch speaks to the extent to which Rustin’s sound system was central to the question of who controlled the march and its message. And the people who sabotaged it understood this intuitively. (I should also mention the curious rumor that was shared by Dave Chapelle in a comedy special on Netflix: “I heard when Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said he had a dream, he was speaking into a PA system that Bill Cosby paid for.” It’s demonstrably untrue, but it also speaks to the place of the sound system in the stories that we tell about the march.)

But what strikes me the most is the sheer practicality of the ends that Rustin, Fauntroy, and the others on the ground were trying to achieve, as conveyed in their own words: “We cannot maintain order where people cannot hear.” “How can you keep a crowd from becoming something else?” “Do you want a fight here tomorrow after all we’ve done?” They weren’t worried about history, but about making it safely to the end of the day. Rustin had been thinking about this march for two decades, and he spent years actively planning for it, conscious that it presented massive organizational challenges that could only be addressed by careful preparation in advance. He had specifically envisioned that it would conclude at the Lincoln Memorial, with a crowd filling the National Mall, a huge space that imposed enormous logistical problems of its own. The primary purpose of the sound system was to allow a quarter of a million people to assemble and disperse in a peaceful fashion, and its properties were chosen with that end in mind. (As Euchner notes: “To get one square mile of clear sound, you need to spend upwards of twenty thousand dollars.”) A system of unusual power, expense, and complexity was the minimum required to ensure the orderly conclusion of an event on that scale. When the audacity to envision the National Mall as a backdrop was combined with the attention to detail to make it work, the result was an electrically charged platform that would amplify any message, figuratively and literally, which made it both powerful and potentially dangerous. Everyone understood this. The saboteurs did. So did the Justice Department. The march’s organizers were keenly aware of it, which was why potentially controversial speakers—including James Baldwin—were excluded from the program. In the end, it became a stage for King, and at least one lesson is clear. When you aim high, and then devote everything you can to the practical side, the result might be more than you could have dreamed.

The living wage

Over the last few years, we’ve observed an unexpected resurgence of interest in the idea of a universal basic income. The underlying notion is straightforward enough, as Nathan Heller summarizes it in a recent article in The New Yorker:

A universal basic income, or U.B.I., is a fixed income that every adult—rich or poor, working or idle—automatically receives from government. Unlike today’s means-tested or earned benefits, payments are usually the same size, and arrive without request…In the U.S., its supporters generally propose a figure somewhere around a thousand dollars a month: enough to live on—somewhere in America, at least—but not nearly enough to live on well.

This concept—which Heller characterizes as “a government check to boost good times or to guard against starvation in bad ones”—has been around for a long time. As one possible explanation for its current revival, Heller suggests that it amounts to “a futurist reply to the darker side of technological efficiency” as robots replace existing jobs, with prominent proponents including Elon Musk and Richard Branson. And while the present political climate in America may seem unfavorable toward such proposals, it may not stay that way forever. As Annie Lowery, the author of the new book Give People Money, recently said to Slate: “Now that Donald Trump was elected…people are really ticked off. In the event that there’s another recession, I think that the space for policymaking will expand even more radically, so maybe it is a time for just big ideas.”

These ideas are certainly big, but they aren’t exactly new, and over the last century, they’ve attracted support from some surprising sources. One early advocate was the young Robert A. Heinlein, who became interested in one such scheme while working on the socialist writer Upton Sinclair’s campaign for the governorship of California in 1934. A decade earlier, a British engineer named C.H. Douglas had outlined a plan called Social Credit, which centered on the notion that the government should provide a universal dividend to increase the purchasing power of individuals. As the Heinlein scholar Robert James writes in his afterword to the novel For Us, the Living:

Heinlein’s version of Social Credit argues that banks constantly used the power of the fractional reserve to profit by manufacturing money out of thin air, by “fiat.” Banks were (and are) required by federal law to keep only a fraction of their total loans on reserve at any time; they could thus manipulate the money supply with impunity…If you took away that power from the banks by ending the fractional reserve system, and instead let the government do the exact same thing for the good of the people, you could permanently resolve the disparities between production and consumption. By simply giving people the amount of money necessary to spring over the gap between available production and the power to consume, you could end the boom and bust business cycle permanently, and free people to pursue their own interests.

And many still argue that a universal basic income could be accomplished, at least in part, by fiat currency. As Lowery writes in her book: “Dollars are not something that the United States government can run out of.”

Heinlein addressed these issues at length in For Us, the Living, his first attempt at a novel, which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, miraculously transports a man from the present into the future mostly so that he can be subjected to interminable lectures on monetary theory. Here’s one mercifully short example, which sounds a lot like the version of basic income that you tend to hear today:

Each citizen receives a check for money, or what amounts to the same thing, a credit to each account each month, from the government. He gets this free. The money so received is enough to provide the necessities of life for an adult, or to provide everything that a child needs for its care and development. Everybody gets these checks—man, woman, and child. Nevertheless, practically everyone works pretty regularly and most people have incomes from three or four times to a dozen or more times the income they receive from the government.

Years later, Heinlein reused much of this material in his far superior novel Beyond This Horizon, which also features a man from our time who objects to the new state of affairs: “But the government simply gives away all this new money. That’s rank charity. It’s demoralizing. A man should work for what he gets. But forgetting that aspect for a moment, you can’t run a government that way. A government is just like a business. It can’t be all outgo and no income.” And after he remains unwilling to concede that a government and a business might serve different ends, another character politely suggests that he go see “a corrective semantician.”

At first, it might seem incongruous to hear these views from Heinlein, who later became a libertarian icon, but it isn’t as odd as it looks. For one thing, the basic concept has defenders from across the political spectrum, including the libertarian Charles Murray, who wants to replace the welfare state by giving ten thousand dollars a year directly to the people. And Heinlein’s fundamental priority—the preservation of individual freedom—remained consistent throughout his career, even if the specifics changed dramatically. The system that he proposed in For Us, the Living was meant to free people to do what they wanted with their lives:

Most professional people work regularly because they like to…Some work full time and some part time. Quite a number of people work for several eras and then quit. Some people don’t work at all—not for money at least. They have simple tastes and are content to live on their heritage, philosophers and mathematicians and poets and such. There aren’t many like that however. Most people work at least part of the time.

Twenty years later, Heinlein’s feelings had evolved in response to the Cold War, as he wrote to his brother Rex in 1960: “The central problem of today is no longer individual exploitation but national survival…and I don’t think we will solve it by increasing the minimum wage.” But such a basic income might also serve as a survival tactic in itself. As Heller writes in The New Yorker, depending on one’s point of view, it can either be “a clean, crisp way of replacing gnarled government bureaucracy…[or] a stay against harsh economic pressures now on the horizon.”

The back matter

“Annotation may seem a mindless and mechanical task,” Louis Menand wrote a few years ago in The New Yorker. “In fact, it calls both for superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands.” Like most other aspects of writing, it can be all these things at once: mindless and an exercise of meticulous skill, mechanical and formally challenging. I’ve been working on the notes for Astounding for the last week and a half, and although I was initially dreading it, the task has turned out to be weirdly absorbing, in the way that any activity that requires repetitive motion but also continuous mild engagement can amount to a kind of hypnotism. The current draft has about two thousand notes, and I’m roughly three quarters of the way through. So far, the process has been relatively painless, although I’ve naturally tended to postpone the tricker ones for later, which means that I’ll end up with a big stack of problem cases to work through at the end. (My plan is to focus on notes exclusively for two weeks, then address the leftovers at odd moments until the book is due in December.) In the meantime, I’m spending hours every day organizing notes, which feels like a temporary career change. They live in their own Word file, like an independent work in themselves, and the fact that they’ll be bundled together as endnotes, rather than footnotes, encourages me to see them as a kind of bonus volume attached to the first, like a vestigial twin that clings to the book like a withered but still vigorous version of its larger sibling.

When you spend weeks at a time on your notes, you end up with strong opinions about how they should be presented. I don’t like numbered endnotes, mostly because the numeric superscripts disrupt the text, and it can frustrating to match them up with the back matter when you’re looking for one in particular. (When I read Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, I found myself distracted by his determination to provide a numbered footnote for seemingly every factual statement, from the date of the Industrial Revolution to the source of the phrase “nothing new under the sun,” and that’s just the first couple of pages. Part of the art of notation is knowing what information you can leave out, and no two writers will come to exactly the same conclusions.) I prefer the keyword system, in which notes are linked to their referent in the body of the book by the page number and a snippet of text. This can lead to a telegraphic, even poetic summary of the contents when you run your eye down the left margin of the page, as in the section of my book about L. Ron Hubbard in the early sixties: “Of course Scientology,” “If President Kennedy did grant me an audience,” “Things go well,” “[Hubbard] chases able people away,” “intellectual garbage,” “Some of [Hubbard’s] claims,” “It is carefully arranged,” “very space opera.” They don’t thrust themselves on your attention until you need them, but when you do, they’re right there. These days, it’s increasingly common for the notes to be provided online, and I can’t guarantee that mine won’t be. But I hope that they’ll take their proper place at the end, where they’ll live unnoticed until readers realize that their book includes the original bonus feature.

The notion that endnotes can take on a life of their own is one that novelists from Nabokov to David Foster Wallace have brilliantly exploited. When reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the first thing that strikes most readers, aside from its sheer size, is its back matter, which takes up close to a hundred pages of closely printed notes at the end of the book. Most of us probably wish that the notes were a little more accessible, as did Dave Eggers, who observes of his first experience reading it: “It was frustrating that the footnotes were at the end of the book, rather than at the bottom of the page.” Yet this wasn’t an accident. As D.T. Max recounts in his fascinating profile of Wallace:

In Bloomington, Wallace struggled with the size of his book. He hit upon the idea of endnotes to shorten it. In April, 1994, he presented the idea to [editor Michael] Pietsch…He explained that endnotes “allow…me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns…5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.” Pietsch countered with an offer of footnotes, which readers would find less cumbersome, but eventually agreed.

What’s particularly interesting here is that the endnotes physically shrink the size of Infinite Jest—simply because they’re set in smaller type—while also increasing how long it takes the diligent reader to finish it. Notes allow a writer to play games not just with space, but with time. (This is true even of the most boring kind of scholarly note, which amounts to a form of postponement, allowing readers to engage with it at their leisure, or even never.) In a more recent piece in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller offers a defense of notes in their proper place at the end of the book:

Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they’re too raw to digest, and often stiff. That’s partly true…Still, the back matter is not simply a garnish. Indexes open a text up. Notes are often integral to meaning, and, occasionally, they’re beautiful, too.

An index turns the book into an object that can be read across multiple dimensions, while notes are a set of tendrils that bind the text to the world, in Robert Frost’s words, “by countless silken ties of love and thought.” As Heller writes of his youthful job at an academic press: “My first responsibility there was proofreading the back matter of books…The tasks were modest, but those of us who carried them out felt that we were doing holy work. We were taking something intricate and powerful and giving it a final polish. I still believe in that refinement.” And so should we.

Amplifying the dream

In the book Nobody Turn Me Around, Charles Euchner shares a story about Bayard Rustin, a neglected but pivotal figure in the civil rights movement who played a crucial role in the March on Washington in 1963:

Bayard Rustin had insisted on renting the best sound system money could buy. To ensure order at the march, Rustin insisted, people needed to hear the program clearly. He told engineers what he wanted. “Very simple,” he said, pointing at a map. “The Lincoln Memorial is here, the Washington Monument is there. I want one square mile where anyone can hear.” Most big events rented systems for $1,000 or $2,000, but Rustin wanted to spend ten times that. Other members of the march committee were skeptical about the need for a deluxe system. “We cannot maintain order where people cannot hear,” Rustin said. If the Mall was jammed with people baking in the sun, waiting in long lines for portable toilets, anything could happen. Rustin’s job was to control the crowd. “In my view it was a classic resolution of the problem of how can you keep a crowd from becoming something else,” he said. “Transform it into an audience.”

Ultimately, Rustin was able to convince the United Auto Workers and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Unions to raise twenty thousand dollars for the sound system, and when he was informed that it ought to be possible to do it for less, he replied: “Not for what I want.” The company American Amplifier and Television landed the contract, and after the system was sabotaged by persons unknown the night before the march, Walter Fauntroy, who was in charge of operations on the ground, called Attorney General Robert Kennedy and said: “We have a serious problem. We have a couple hundred thousand people coming. Do you want a fight here tomorrow after all we’ve done?”

The system was fixed just in time, and its importance to the march is hard to overstate. As Zeynep Tufekci writes in her recent book Twitter and Tear Gas: “Rustin knew that without a focused way to communicate with the massive crowd and to keep things orderly, much could go wrong…The sound system worked without a hitch during the day of the march, playing just the role Rustin had imagined: all the participants could hear exactly what was going on, hear instructions needed to keep things orderly, and feel connected to the whole march.” And its impact on our collective memory of the event may have been even more profound. In an article in last week’s issue of The New Yorker, which is where I first encountered the story, Nathan Heller notes in a discussion of Tufekci’s work:

Before the march, Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered variations on his “I Have a Dream” speech twice in public. He had given a longer version to a group of two thousand people in North Carolina. And he had presented a second variation, earlier in the summer, before a vast crowd of a hundred thousand at a march in Detroit. The reason we remember only the Washington, D.C., version, Tufekci argues, has to do with the strategic vision and attentive detail work of people like Rustin. Framed by the Lincoln Memorial, amplified by a fancy sound system, delivered before a thousand-person press bay with good camera sight lines, King’s performance came across as something more than what it had been in Detroit—it was the announcement of a shift in national mood, the fulcrum of a movement’s story line and power. It became, in other words, the rarest of protest performances: the kind through which American history can change.

Heller concludes that successful protest movements hinge on the existence of organized, flexible, practical structures with access to elites, noting that the sound system was repaired, on Kennedy’s orders, by the Army Corps of Engineers: “You can’t get much cozier with the Man than that.”

There’s another side to the story, however, which neither Tufekci or Heller mention. In his memoir Behind the Dream, the activist Clarence B. Jones recalls:

The Justice Department and the police had worked hand in hand with the March Committee to design a public address system powerful enough to get the speakers’ voices across the Mall; what march coordinators wouldn’t learn until after the event had ended was that the government had built in a bypass to the system so that they could instantly take over control if they deemed it necessary…Ted [Brown] and Bayard [Rustin] told us that right after the march ended those officers approached them, eager to relieve their consciences and reveal the truth about the sound system. There was a kill switch and an administration official’s thumb had been on it the entire time.

The journalist Gary Jounge—whose primary source seems to be Jones—expands on this claim in his book The Speech: “Fearing incitement from the podium, the Justice Department secretly inserted a cutoff switch into the sound system so they could turn off the speakers if an insurgent group hijacked the microphone. In such an eventuality, the plan was to play a recording to Mahalia Jackson singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ in order to calm down the crowd.” And in Pillar of Fire, Taylor Branch identifies the official in question as Jerry Bruno, President Kennedy’s “advance man,” who “positioned himself to cut the power to the public address system if rally speeches proved incendiary.” Regardless of the truth of the matter, it speaks to the extent to which Rustin’s sound system was central to the question of who controlled the march and its message. If nothing else, the people who sabotaged it understood this intuitively. (I should also mention the curious rumor, shared by Dave Chapelle in a recent comedy special on Netflix: “I heard when Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said he had a dream, he was speaking into a PA system that Bill Cosby paid for.” It’s demonstrably untrue, but it also speaks to the hold that the sound system has on the stories that we tell about the march.)

But what strikes me the most is the sheer practicality of the ends that Rustin, Fauntroy, and the others on the ground were trying to achieve. Listen to how they describe it: “We cannot maintain order where people cannot hear.” “How can you keep a crowd from becoming something else?” “Do you want a fight here tomorrow after all we’ve done?” They weren’t worried about history, but about making it safely to the end of the day. Rustin had been thinking about this march for two decades, and he spent years actively planning for it, conscious that it presented massive organizational challenges that could only be addressed by careful preparation in advance. He had specifically envisioned it as ending at the Lincoln Memorial, with a crowd filling the National Mall, a huge space that imposed enormous logistical problems of its own. The primary purpose of the sound system was to allow a quarter of a million people to assemble and disperse in a peaceful fashion, and its properties were chosen with that end in mind. (As Euchner notes: “To get one square mile of clear sound, you need to spend upwards of twenty thousand dollars.”) A system of unusual power, expense, and complexity was the minimum required to ensure the orderly conclusion of an event on this scale. But when the audacity to envision the National Mall as a backdrop was combined with the attention to detail to make it work, the result was an electrically charged platform that would amplify any message, figuratively and literally, which made it both powerful and potentially dangerous. Everyone understood this. The saboteurs did. So did the Justice Department. The march’s organizers were keenly aware of it, which was why potentially controversial speakers—including James Baldwin—were excluded from the program. In the end, it became a stage for King, and at least one lesson is clear. When you aim high, and then devote everything you can to the practical side, the result might be more than you could have dreamed.

The great teachers

In his recent New Yorker review of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Nathan Heller offers up a piece of wisdom that I wish someone had shared with me fifteen years ago:

The best advice I ever got in college came from the freshman-year adviser to whom I had been assigned…I had come into her office with a dog-eared copy of the catalogue. I thought that maybe I would take a class on Keats? And physics? My adviser, who taught history, shook her head. “The topics aren’t important,” she said. “What you want to do is find the people who are the best teachers and the best writers and take whatever they teach.”

I’m not sure if I ever articulated this principle to myself as clearly as it’s stated here, but a fumbling version of it guided many—though not most—of my choices in college. I was able to audit courses from the likes of Cornel West and Stephen Jay Gould, and when it came time to select a major, I was guided primarily by the idea that I should spend my time in a department that was ranked among the best of its kind, which is how I ended up in classics. But if I have one regret about how I spent those four years, it’s that I didn’t follow this tip more systematically. There were a lot of great classes that I could have attended but didn’t, and I won’t have a chance again.

Fortunately, though, the scope of this advice isn’t confined to college. When I look at my own bookshelves, I get the sense that I’ve been unconsciously following this model all along, at least when it comes to the authors I read. There’s a wild array of titles and subjects here, and I picked up many of these books on little more than a lucky hunch. What unifies most of them, though, is the aura they radiate of lives spent in pursuit of difficult intellectual goals, and the ability to convey them in ways that shed light onto unexpected corners. It’s why Edward O. Wilson’s books on ants share space with the work of statistician and graphic designer Edward Tufte, and why I keep The Plan of St. Gall a few shelves away from books by or about Colin Fletcher, George Saintsbury, Pauline Kael, Roger Penrose, Kimon Nicolaides, and Saul Bass, along with such otherwise inexplicable titles as Chinese Calligraphy and Ship Models: How to Build Them. These books don’t have a lot in common except for the fact that they’re all the work of great teachers, and I’ve found that it’s best to follow them wherever they decide to go, without worrying too much about the subject.

Recently, for instance, I’ve become interested in the work of Ernest Schwiebert, a legendary author among fly fishermen who remains relatively unknown to the rest of the world. I’ve never been fishing in my life, but after encountering Schwiebert—thanks, as with so many other books that have changed my life, to a glowing mention in The Whole Earth Catalog—I’ve started to think of him as a mentor and kindred spirit. Angling is an appealing sport, even from the confines of an armchair, because of the multitude of skills and states of mind it requires, and there are times when I feel that Schwiebert, who was a Princeton-trained architect and author by trade, is really talking about something else:

Its skills are a perfect equilibrium between tradition, physical dexterity and grace, strength, logic, esthetics, our powers of observation, problem solving, perception, and the character of our experience and knowledge. It also combines the primordial rhythms of the stalk with the chesslike puzzles of fly-hatches and fishing, echoing the blood rituals of the hunt without demanding the kill.

Take out the reference to physical dexterity and grace, and you have a pretty good description of how it feels to write a novel, which requires a constantly shifting balance between intellectual precision, brute force, intuition, and luck. And this is ultimately true of any craft, which goes a long way toward explaining why I find myself reading books on urban planning, coding, theater, animation, and other subjects that have only a tangential connection to what I do for a living. At one time, I thought I was looking for particular insights from other fields that would turn me into a better writer, but that isn’t necessarily true; the challenges that writing presents are so specific that approaches from other disciplines are useful primarily as metaphors. What really matters, I’ve found, is spending time in the company of great teachers and craftsmen. Those qualities of temperament—curiosity, diligence, an embrace of serendipity combined with ruthless pragmatism—remain constant across all forms of workmanship or expression. And even after college, we can find role models and examples in all the best teachers, regardless of their areas of expertise, as long as we’re willing to seek them out.

Thoughts from an excellent sheep

I spent this past weekend with a handful of my closest friends from college, in an apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Square that we’d rented for an informal reunion. We’ve been getting together every few years since graduation, and although the makeup of the group has remained largely the same, shaped mostly by marriages and availability to travel, there have been some big changes along the way: this time around, there were no fewer than three kids in the house, and I expect the number to grow. We’re at a point in our lives when these gatherings start to feel uncomfortably like The Big Chill, and we spent about as much time sharing toilet-training tips as we did playing Cards Against Humanity. Looking around the room, though, I felt curiously proud of where we’d been and what we’d accomplished. My friends and their spouses have carved out meaningful careers in public service, academia, technology, and whatever it is you want to call what I’m doing these days. And while I think these people would have done remarkable things no matter where they went to college, I’d like to believe that our experiences as undergraduates had at least a tiny bit to do with it.

As it happens, New York Magazine published an item yesterday saying that Harvard ought to be stripped of its nonprofit status, on account of both its massive endowment and the fact that “it charges its rich students—and they are mostly from rich families, with many destined to be rich themselves—hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition and fees.” It’s an odd argument, especially because it appeared on the same day as a New York Times piece noting that Harvard is among the most economically diverse of top universities in the country, and it charges less for tuition for lower- and middle-class families than any other college on the list. But it’s also part of a larger conversation, which comes around every decade or so, about the role of elite universities and what they owe their students. Last month, Yale professor William Deresiewicz published the book Excellent Sheep, which warns that top colleges are producing a generation of risk-averse overachievers who excel at working within a system of incentives but find themselves helpless beyond it. If this sounds a little familiar, it’s because I devoured similar books fifteen years ago, from Who Killed Homer? to The Closing of the American Mind, and they shaped my own decisions as much as Deresiewicz is likely to do for a few members of this year’s class.

But as I soon discovered, this kind of argument only reflects part of the story. In an insightful, if skeptical, review in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller lays out the core of Deresiewicz’s case:

Even after graduation, elite students show a taste for track-based, well-paid industries like finance and consulting (which in 2010 together claimed more than a third of the jobs taken by the graduates of Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton). And no wonder. A striver can “get into” Goldman Sachs the way that she got into Harvard. There is no résumé submission or recruiting booth if you want to make a career as a novelist.

I’d like to think that I know a little about this, because I’ve been on both sides of the equation. Shortly after graduation, I went to New York without much else in mind except the ambition to become a writer, and within a few months, I’d fallen into exactly the kind of job that Deresiewicz decries: I ended up at a hedge fund mostly because it was willing to hire me, and I spent close to four years in finance. For a while, I tried to have it both ways, working by day and writing by night, but I ultimately had to choose. And the fact that I decided to leave and try my luck as a novelist doesn’t mean that I think any less of those who stayed. Heller says it well: “When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of ‘moral imagination’ may be at play.”

In other words, a university education can be either a launching pad into the upper classes or a means of channeling smart kids into odd, challenging fields and ideas. The glorious thing about a place like Harvard, Yale, or any number of other colleges is that it can be both simultaneously, sometimes to the very same student. Still, I may not agree with everything that Deresiewicz says, but his voice deserves to be part of the conversation, in opposition to the forces that would rather push graduates into comfortable lives and careers. As with so much else in life, you only achieve a sensible mean by allowing passionate viewpoints on all sides, and a book like Excellent Sheep serves as a necessary counterbalance to the arguments that speak louder with money than with words. What we all need, in the end, is a college that serves as a machine for enabling such choices. And even as a student, I knew that the potential writers and artists in my class were the outliers, and that life itself had some surprises in store even for the conventional superstars, often from seeds that their educations had planted in secret. As Heller concludes: “College seniors leave with plans for law careers and then, a J.D. later, find their bliss as graphic artists. Financiers emerge as novelists.”