Dimly

1. Valorization

2. Periodically, words bubble up as I read. I think, “That’s a word I ought to use,” and then, “Oh yeah, I have nothing to write.”

3. Not writing, I’ve indulged in

—Doodling

—Considering how to reverse-engineer crossword puzzles from solutions to bizarre clues

—Dreaming of a crossword where every clue yields the answer “oreo”

—Thinking about, without jotting a word, each past juncture in my life

—Reading and listening

—Walking

—Sorting possessions into piles and judging them

—Dealing with those possessions justly and swiftly

—Researching places my extra funds might go

—Wasting time investigating how brains acquire words

4. For years, I logged running miles in the early morning before work, even before weak-tea pre-sunlight. On lucky weekdays, there came a sudden gold show. Landmarks appeared—the pastel house, the defunct plumbing supplier, the missing stretch of sidewalk, the pollocked tree—each sight notching progress. Streets I learned by repetition became rectangles, triangles, and squares, and, when I turned around, my shoes soggy from sweeping my feet through dew, I carried pictures, sounds, smells, motions, memories.

If anyone had asked what I did before work, I could have said. No one asked.

5. My family has a terrible history with sleep. My grandmother’s busy brain roused her in the middle of the night until she became bored enough to iron. For most of my childhood, my mom—reading exclusively between 12 and 3 am—finished three or four mysteries a week. My sister-in-law recounts my brother’s restless nocturnal walks about the house. He’s like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, she says. Just one thought wakes me. One worry, however stupid in daylight, assures I’ll circle anticipation and memory for an hour or so.

How much time have I recorded, barely remembered, just felt, nearly conscious?

6. I could iron, but we just don’t have that much ironing to do. 

7. Here’s something interesting I learned while wasting time investigating how brains acquire words. Because of our deep instinct to gather sounds, we soak up intonation, cadence, and syllabic stress before birth. Babies whose parents speak French or German cry differently, and, gasping for their first breath, they know what we can’t know fully—how the language surrounding them verbalizes anger, fear, love, and suspicion. It will require a few years to bridge the communication gap reliably enough to say, approximately, what makes them angry, fearful, amorous, or wary. It will take longer to see themselves as some nationality, culture, or tribe.

Though maybe they knew long before.

8. Valorization, the second definition, means “the act or process of giving, assigning, or enhancing value.”

So many things I’ve thought valuable: my science award for a second grade project on space exploration, a paper weight my father gave me that encased a replica of an ancient coin in plexiglass, a plaster of paris bust of Abraham Lincoln I bought at a church white elephant sale, a teacher’s personal note, a student thanking me for helping her reach graduation, one of one thousand Instagram likes I took to heart.

9. The first girl I didn’t scare off was in high school, junior year. Maybe she dismissed my ardor as a performance. Maybe she remained guarded no matter how hard I assailed. Maybe she shared faith in our deep and abiding connection and affection.

I can’t be sure because all I have to fish for memory is the blunt hook of language.

10. When I can’t sleep, I see myself in a press conference beset by questions. I handle it by mimicking a blindfolded plate spinner… in the brightest spotlight…  on a unicycle.

Are dreams necessary for creativity? Though you might appreciate an intense subconscious, must a person live a second vivid life as a dreamer to ignite imagination and invention?

Sleep knits “the ravell’d sleeve of care,” in such hurly-burly fashion. It’s exhausting.

11. On the way to the gym at 5:35 am, I turn to my wife and say, “I had the strangest dream.”

“What?” It’s the indulgent what.

“My mom was on horseback and barged into a herd of bears—like, there must have been 50 bears, cubs and all, moving en masse—and she angered them by kind of thoughtlessly ambling in. So they attacked her and the horse, climbing up with their claws, and grabbing her with wide open jaws.”

“Okay.”

“One had my mom’s head completely in its mouth, but then the horse and my mom veered close to the lake and they all fell in, bears and all.”

“Weird.”

“After that, I called 911, and my mom was fine.”

“So, what do you think—it’s 5:45—can we be out of the gym by 6:15?” 

12. Perhaps it’s aging filling memory to overfull, but lately learning seems like an exchange. I’m always asking, “What am I going to lose?”

Except that’s not exactly it. So many memories are diminished without being lost—the whiff of last night’s sautéed onions clinging to my sweater or the light before snow that exactly matches the time I really talked to a best friend.

13. I ask everybody, “If you had a choice between remembering things and remembering where you remember them from, what would you choose?”

Mostly people blink.

It’s provenance. Which matters more, the thing itself or its origin? I might be satisfied with what I possess—why does it matter where it came from?—or I might want to investigate its creation, the deep ferment or combustion that made it be. 

14. Being here and being there: standing at the Paulina L stop, listening to a book about making the most of your day, eradicating your bad habits, and just generally being a much happier person, then checking your Transit App to know how long the Brown Line to the Loop will be.

15. “Valorization” is maybe too big a word. It attracts undue attention to itself.

People perceive children as sponges for second languages, but what if they just have more room? Once they grow up, some may seek words to slip between “aroma” and “perfume,” between “summon” and “evoke,” deciding between subtle colors and tones. Others will satisfy for whatever.

For them, “Valorization” is positively out. 

16. I used to tell people that my father, a pathologist, might have had a bigger medical vocabulary than most people have a regular one.

Now I wonder if he had enough words even then. What about all the stuff amidst and among the gist and the ginsued, the unnamed and dim, all the lurking, redolent, and resonant things barely there?

No Joke

Surprise! Even on the internet, something defies discovery.

In 1982, visiting a graduate school classmate’s Massachusetts home, I heard a comedy album collecting Vermont humor, a combination he called “a contradiction in terms.” The only joke I remember is…

Farmer, I’ve been on this hill for an hour now, ain’t there no end to it?

Stranger, this ain’t no hill. You’ve just lost your hind wheels.

It wasn’t really funny then, and, muted by time and missing a Vermonter accent, it seems less funny now. Still, it sticks. I hoped the oracle Google might peg its provenance, but she turned up nothing—despite every combination of entreaties.

I’m asking too much, have traveled too much. Who wrote and/or told the joke doesn’t matter. Its persistence does. I’ve climbed many hills since, most of my own making.

When my daughter was young, I learned about “catastrophizers,” people who validate adversity and see struggles as graver than they really are. A broader—probably more personal—definition might include those who endow their lives with meaning according to real or imagined obstacles. It’s a terrible but persistent habit.

Sometimes, my own hill feels endless. The formula says, “Must I always be second?” or “They are all against me,” or “I just can’t catch a break” or “When will my train arrive?” Separating reality from perspective sometimes feels impossible. I subsist on my perspective. Without hind wheels, I climb and climb.

For years, I’ve been looking for anyone who can tell me what hill I’m actually on, but we’re all on hills made steeper by their being ours. I accept friends’ preoccupations because I have so many myself. They have—we all have—our troubles. Still, oddly and irrationally, a voice says, “What about mine?”

It’s selfish to crave recognition in this distracted and overactive time, but I look for moments someone turns to regard my hill and, however politely or secretly insincerely, says, “Yes, I see.”

This week, I retire from teaching after 37 years, but, for all the fond memories that time represents, it’s early—not only because I’m just 60 but also because, aside from missing hind wheels, I still have something to offer. The stereotype of an “Experienced” teacher features shuffling yellowed notes, telling students “Well, that’s your problem,” and meeting each wave of pedagogical innovation with “Not again,” but that’s not me. I still love the people I teach. Caring about their learning has sustained me over so many cycles of September to June. I’m just tired, though ready to travel on.

In my fantasy, the farmer offers help. He backtracks until we find what’s missing. He overlooks my self-absorption. He affixes the old wheels or new ones or a facsimile and sends me off, saying, “Stranger, we need wheels. Let’s hope these are meant for you.”

That might end this hill.

Near Future

A fiction…

She was nice, and of course she was nice.

Yet, though her civility wasn’t quite noblesse oblige, he smelled assumptions about the relative status of “you” and “me.”

“State the nature of your problem.”

Somewhere a programmer smirked.

“I’m depressed,” he said.

“Acknowledged,” she said. He couldn’t hear the spinning computer. He felt it.

Three steps, experience told him, between this moment and his prescription. He must get each exchange exactly right.

“Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms? One, loss of interest in common activities; two, loss of concentration; three, insomnia or hypersomnia; four, self-loathing; five, unaccountable physical pain; six, slowed speech or activity; seven, loss or energy and initiative; eight, inescapable moods like hopelessness or anger; nine, responses of agitation and irritability; or ten, restlessness.”

He waited.

“You may designate by number.”

Only self-loathing got him the hard stuff. It was, after all, the top vulnerability, confessing a tentative hold on living. The others got you uppers or downers, but no escape.

“Number Four.”

“Repeat.”

“Four.”

“Acknowledged.”

He wouldn’t think AIs would be so parsimonious, so transparently artificial. Future interfaces would promise something warmer.

“Which term best describes your…” and here there was the expected mechanical grope toward terms, “self-loathing?”

“One, frustration; two, discontent; three, disappointment; four, inadequacy; five, failure; six, abnegation.”

He looked up “abnegation” the first time but didn’t need to again. Besides, shouldn’t he have known? The order of terms made the correct answer obvious.

“Abnegation.”

“Acknowledged.”

Perhaps it was imagination, but her voice always softened. Likely, context flavored tone, but he drew a deep breath, a sigh of relief.

Silence.

“Our records indicate that this is your,” another hiccup, “seventeenth visit. Is that correct?”

No sense denying. They already knew.

“Yes,” he said.

And now the wait, the exchange anticipated yet never expected, communication between intelligences beyond his conception and still always offering welcome, albeit foreign, understanding.

Then the familiar pause, a moment he took to prepare for devastation and loss.

“Your prescription is waiting at your registered pharmacy.”

“Thank you.”

He shouldn’t read this outcome as affection, but did.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No.”

Few goodbyes meant much, but she seemed real and, as with any ideal departure, her voice evaporated, promising hope… whatever hopelessness he’d learned to accept.

Relief was beyond him—bliss had to be enough.

 

Scriptio Inferior

1.

A college course called “Meaning and Value in Western Thought” was my first exposure to palimpsests, ancient manuscripts washed or scraped to make way for new writing. I don’t remember what specific meaning or value survived well enough for scholars to find it later, but I do remember my professor using the occasion to develop a metaphor that, since then, has become familiar.

The past is a palimpsest and so are we.

2.

Apparently, my grandfather excelled at angry letters. I never knew him, but my father described him sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear, scratching out cutting phrases with a fountain pen and planting the seeds of deadly subtext. My father said he worked and reworked these letters for hours, pausing only long enough to chuckle at his handiwork.

3.

The pre-computer age required much more handwriting, and I enjoyed the negotiation of long-hand. Carets and cross-outs overwhelmed the text. Arrows led to sentences in the margin, and, at the top of the page, I questioned choices, determined to return to them later.

The effort transformed these drafts into holy objects I lacked courage to toss. Even after typing the final composition, I saved them. Some still lurk in my files, their cramped elaborations and digressions winding like varicose veins.

4.

We’re told now to wait before sending sensitive emails. We’re supposed to let them sit, or write them to get our true feelings out. Then, we must delete them. That process should create a more circumspect and neutral message… or a promise “to talk.”

5.

My father, like his father, wrote angry letters, but where my grandfather’s targets were columnists, politicians, and public figures, my father aired gripes about ball-point pens that failed before they expended all the ink in their barrels or coffee filters that weren’t sealed properly and left grounds in his morning cup.

He too delighted in his craft. He also received many unctuous replies and a lot of free shit.

6.

The expense of parchment made of lamb, calf, or goat skin (then known as pergamene) was a big reason palimpsests existed. The page was costly and hard to get, so no surface could be cast off or relegated to an archive. It needed reuse, and reuse required erasure.

Or so they thought. The underwriting or scriptio inferior persisted and could be recovered through various chemical processes—and now ultraviolet light.

What would the authors think? Would it feel like being caught talking to yourself?

7.

I do most of my drafting in my head now, revising and re-revising even as I speak. I mean to say just what I mean and express it just so. Magma-like anger does roil inside me—more than anyone may realize—but the few times it gets out in conversation, it immediately turns to steam amid raining apologies.

Confident people revel in righteous indignation. I ruminate over extenuating factors and my role in every galling slight. I swallow my angry letters.

Or write them to myself.

8.

Once, while I was directing a play in my first teaching job, I had to purchase a hammer before a set construction session. I kept the receipt and filled out a reimbursement complete with—the eighties—three colors and carbon paper between them. I needed the signature of the art department chair, and, hunched over his desk while he was away, affixed a post-it note to the form and scrawled, “I don’t know WHY they don’t trust me, and you have to verify I really bought a hammer, but here…”

My pique passed through every color and the carbons. The next day a smirking note arrived explaining proper procedure.

9.

This weekend, a situation at work required the most consequential form of charged communication. I felt ill-used and thought about retribution. In my imagination, either they would pay or I’d make myself heard, the bile inside voiced. Like colleagues who have real convictions and real gumption.

I wrote several drafts instead.

And—you can tell—I’m confessing nothing about the true subject.

10.

There’s a moment in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold… and the Boys” I particularly appreciate. Two servants to Apartheid-era Harold have suffered such devastating slights and deliberate stabs from him, ending with Harold spitting in the servant Sam’s face. Sam turns to his co-worker Willie—in Harold’s presence—and asks, “And if he had done it to you, Willie?”

Willie replies, “Me? Spit at me like I was a dog? Ja, then I want to hit him. I want to hit him hard!… But maybe all I do is go cry at the back. He’s little boy, Sam.”

11.

The dissatisfaction of silence hasn’t kept me from tasting it constantly.

12.

In my pretend dialogue with my grandfather I ask if his conscience ever told him to restrain himself and say nothing and, if so—angry letter unsent—did he feel defeated?

I want to ask, “Where do feelings go when they go nowhere at all?

Where You May Find Me (in 12 parts)

1.

Growing up, my older brother collected butterflies. I remember little more than the lurid details—final flutters in the killing jar, paper strips and pins to assure rigor mortis set just right, and the second generation of smaller insects invading his collection’s abdomens.

2.

At my age, memory dotters about the inessential, humming and speaking to and for itself. I struggle to find energy to record it.

3.

The book I’m reading contains prose that makes me want to write. The urge has mostly passed otherwise. Somehow the mellifluence of language—yes, I just used the word “mellifluence”—withstands waves of failure and futility like the desperation to string notes that, to anyone else, are not music and certainly don’t suggest wisdom or weight.

Having nothing to say, it seems, can’t hold me back.

4.

On the L this afternoon, as I unstacked my pile of stored podcasts, another passenger prattled about matters I couldn’t hear and only understood through the discreet upturned glances of other travelers.

5.

Here’s another story:

Most of the lies I told in school cast me as dangerous. I told Dennis Fewell I’d tried mushrooms and, a week later, one of his friends, half-laughing and high-smirking, asked if I’d like to try again. I declined, burning as though I’d been caught, pants down, looking at what I ought not.

6.

The stories I tell are so many layers of phyllo. The key, TV tells me, is the butter and dough folded over and over into thinner and thinner layers. The key, so TV says, is kneading for division—subtle and distinct.

7.

One morning, surveying my unfulfilled potential, I hit upon something new—I’ve never learned to express my true self.

What followed was a twisty trip through various meanings and permutations of “true” and “self,” then the general miasma rising after another night spent skimming sleep.

8.

Among my many envies, the strongest remains uplift. Its Pavlovian impact springs from desperate desire and salivation… or desire for salvation.

9.

Oddly, a kind of humor comes from hopelessness. Ice and banana peels rely on finding no traction. Without the bite of true contact between surfaces, we’re free to disassociate, to dream the serious isn’t that serious. “Consequential,” after all, is a big word.

10.

My last anecdote for now:

Sitting in my seventh-floor unit in West Lakeview Chicago, I watched, with some bemusement, a dog walker untangling her pet from four successive poles. What struck me, from my vantage, was how deftly she navigated absurdity, how unconsciously.

11.

Knowing few readers have made it this far allows me to say I’m sorry for my staining, straining theme—the self-disgust accompanying me through every sentence, phrase, and word. I try to hide, I do.

I hope someone notes how hard I prod misery to sing.

12.

I wake at 4 am. Who knows why, but the hour I spend before nearly anyone matters to me. It’s time no eyes are upon me. It feels weightless. I appreciate buoyancy typically denied.

Wind blow as it will, I float.

The Not Chair

In a drawing class a few years ago, a teacher asked us to draw a chair by depicting all the spaces around it. Drawing the not-chair, he told us, restarts the mind, tricks it into bypassing the brain’s assumptions about how a chair should look. The exercise does, as he promised, force you to scrutinize the scene afresh.

Figuratively speaking, I’ve been drawing the not-chair a lot recently.

With my 60^th birthday approaching and after 36 years of teaching, I’m working part-time this year, meaning I have not only fewer classes but also fewer responsibilities as advisor, club sponsor, or coach. My schedule is largely open. I arrive a little before I teach. I leave a little after I finish. This new regimen is only a couple of weeks old but feels mostly like not-teaching. Assumptions about my life’s purpose have changed.

Like probably most people, furniture fills my day. Usual tasks take up its room: exercising, making a bag lunch for work, commuting, visiting Starbucks, and engaging in various other regular activities you may know as well as I do. And most of that furniture—until this fall—surrounded work. I had little time left over after planning for class, grading papers, meeting with colleagues, and answering student emails.

Now I look for ways to occupy my newly expansive day. I already have one other sort of furniture—writing a daily haiku for my haiku blog—and, in June, I added another by creating Instagram account (@davidb.marshall) for a daily doodle. “Doodle,” though, may not be the right term for what I post there, some of which take hours to complete. Perhaps because it’s easier to draw patterns than it is to think about what I really need to do, I spend a lot of time brainlessly coloring in shapes or painting pages in preparation for making shapes to color in. Maybe as long as I have the time to doodle there’s no harm in it, but I’m never sure whether I’m using time or filling it in. I believe in any endeavor that I can regard as practice—that’s what I tell myself, anyway—but how does one become a more skilled doodler?

So I also work on work more than necessary—planning, grading, and planning some more. My son correctly predicted I’d have trouble kicking workahol, and he was right. I’m still waking at 4 am to reread what I’m teaching and put the finest of finishing touches on lesson plans. I’ve discovered you never need run out of work if you can think of more work to do. I’ve concluded everything takes exactly as long as you have to do it.

Plus, what I want to do stands little chance against what others want from me. A life of fulfilling expectations, keeping appointments, and meeting deadlines hasn’t prepared me for initiative. For a workaholic, a fine line divides idleness and guilt. Relaxation seems out of the question. I read the back pages of the paper, listen to podcasts as soon as they appear in my feed, and try to do those household chores I too often neglect. I’m embarrassed to admit how often I check Instagram. Yet I wonder about where I’m going,  who I am now that I’m only part time me.

So far, I’ve found time for everything but redefinition. Where does identity come from—circumstance or choice? Once you remove the chair, how do you draw the not-chair?

Modus Operandi

The story of the poor shoemaker keeps resurfacing. As I remember it, the owner of a failing shoe business ends the day with just one scrap a leather remaining and lovingly places it on his workbench, sighing and resolving to close up shop the next morning. Yet, as the kindly protagonist sleeps, elves turn his final scrap into a fine pair of slippers, which the shoemaker sells profitably enough to buy more leather, which the elves—ever helpful—turn into two pairs of shoes… and so on.

I can’t remember the end because I can’t get past elves grading my papers or, in the likely case elves don’t exist, the notion the story metaphorically describes sleep labor or work performed under hypnosis.

My tasks accumulate like towering sheets of leather. I’m wondering, “Where the hell are my elves?” and “Hey, does anyone know a good hypnotist?”

Gretchen Rubin divides people into four types based on their source of motivation. Obligers respond to demands made by others—the parameters of job descriptions, the promise to undertake a project, the crunch of deadlines. Questioners only undertake tasks they internalize—if it makes sense, they will do it and, if not, no. Rebels don’t accept any outside instruction, period, because instructions must come from within. The final type, Upholders, answer calls of circumstance and desire—the source, in or out, makes little difference.

Apparently, I’m an upholder.

Only I’m not. I combine the worst possibilities of all four. Like a rebel, I’m keenly aware of obligations’ imposition. Like a questioner, I must convince myself anew each task matters. Like an obliger, the guilt of not completing something surpasses the pleasure of completion. Like an upholder, I’m unsure when I’m being true to what I want.

Maybe I belong in a fifth category—the Inert. My wife asks whether I want to go to an art fair or the movies or the grocery store, and I say no—not because I can’t, really, but because not deciding is easier than grappling with what I want. A body at rest stays at rest.

Seen from afar, I look disciplined in habit and demeanor, full of conspicuous effort. I rise punctually and early. I exercise daily. I finish work in mostly timely fashion, and—every day—manage. Most of my tasks, however, are furniture, and none of what appears self-discipline is actually challenging. I’m relieved not having to think. The elves might as well be responsible.

Fundamental to Rubin’s motivational types is desire. Wherever the request arises—from you, someone else, and/or you via someone else—nothing substitutes for desire. Whether obliging, questioning, rebelling, or upholding, all paths lead to accepting your motives as true.

But what if truth eludes you? The question becomes, “What do you want to do?” and, until you know that answer, motivation remains a mystery.

Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds… So What?

My profession demands infinite alternate explanations. Teaching young writers, I exchange one description for another and turn to what something is like instead of what it is. A research paper is baking a cake, passage analysis is throwing a pebble in the pond, a writer must swing, as Tarzan does, from vines chosen in advance.

I am Mr. Analogy.

I thought about my status when I encountered a post online distinguishing between “reasoning from first principles” and “reasoning by analogy.” The author resorts to an analogy himself in saying that using principles makes you a chef and using analogies makes you a cook. The chef is a scientist who combines ingredients anew. The cook will “look at the way things are already done and… essentially copy it.” The cook might adjust the recipe in a minor way but follows an established approach.

This analogy makes me a cook, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

My first impulse is to extend the comparison. Cooks seek practicality and reliable results. They repeat themselves, sure, but they also hone their approach until every element is just right. If I only have so much to teach about writing—only what I understand and accept—I’d better learn to express it in tried and true ways. My students can take or leave what I have to say. I’m only trying to help.

But I’m defensive. I recognize that, to real writers, each task is a fresh challenge that demands new solutions. They never imitate themselves or settle into a monotonous voice. Maybe my cookery demands compliance instead of genius. Perhaps I should stop saying detail and explanation are like bricks and mortar or that, like a knife, a specific supporting detail can grow dull if it’s used for more than one purpose.

You see I can’t stop. The post I read says, “Your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.” At this stage of my teaching career, I’m too tired to reinvent much. I tell myself what’s worked before is still working. I keep my head down and cook.

Analogies, I figure, demand a specific sort of intelligence, one connecting tasks, appealing to common skills, common patterns of thought and application. The analogy-maker hopes for another avenue of discovery, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. I want my students to say or feel, “I never thought of it that way.” Of course I have thought of it that way, or I wouldn’t trot out the same exhausted comparisons. I just can’t help it.

The explanation becomes new to me if it’s new to them.

Reluctantly

I momentarily lost it last fall when another senior complained about reading 22 pages assigned over two nights—in 14-point font, with sections interrupted and the rest of the page blank. In I983, my first year of teaching, I asked my department chair what homework reading load was reasonable. I operated on her standard for nearly a decade, 30 pages, but since then…

People outside my profession ask me, “How do your current students compare to the first students you taught?”

Honestly, I fear the question, as who wants to be a prune-faced back-in-my-day-er howling about change most label progress? I’ve rehearsed my answer, picturing the students I teach lugging their stretched-to-bursting backpacks into class. I like them. They smile at me. They thank me. They wave hello, goodbye.

The invention of averages hasn’t done much for subtlety. If I say, on average, my students are not as good at reading and writing, then one of the sharpest of my current students appears at an imagined door. I do teach some powerful thinkers, idealists, imaginative innovators. Some revere books and commit themselves to absorbing, testing, and exploiting ideas. The rest are, as a whole, good people. I respect them and would hate offending them.

But you hear me winding up. Whether I want an answer, I have one.

Unsurprisingly, reading challenges my students most. They seem unpracticed because few circumstances in the rest of their lives expects reading, and it’s a trial to convince them patience matters, that, the more they notice and retain, the more discerning their understanding and interpretation will be. For them, nuance matters less and less. They make dramatic links between disparate ideas but aim for fireworks, not gentle brushstrokes. Skilled at the broadest thinking, they sometimes resemble bots devoted to cursory recognition. Complications, exceptions, paradoxes, and mysteries don’t interest them as much. Instructions falling between extremes tax them. They want to know what’s required.

Impatience, I think, makes a bigger difference. The issue isn’t the number of pages but the page number where they become frustrated. The particular assignment my seniors objected to was Eula Biss’ “Pain Scale,” a roaming lyric essay about Biss’ back pain that included allusions to Dante’s Inferno and the history of numbers. Quixotically, I believed they might take to its strange and dramatic leaps between different arenas of thought, but some barely reached the bottom of the first page before deciding, and later letting me know, “This is bullshit.”

Every good student is a good critic, but judgment can be peremptory, skipping knowing, understanding, interpreting, detecting authors’ aims, and formulating thoughtful responses. Obviously, I’m heavy on judgment myself—it’s in the RNA of our times—but I’d love more than a “I didn’t like it.”

Maybe pragmatism explains their perspective. They’ve been conditioned not to deviate from straight paths. Their parents urge them to fix on destinations with less help getting there. Many parents forget about encouraging joy. To recognize how limitless they might be, students need to struggle and overcome, yet, because minor dents are too costly to their reputations, every accident or setback needs immediate remediation. They hardly have time to stumble or to distinguish between stumbling and failing. They’re told they must not fail and seldom come close. Few experiences lead to the redefinition—refinement—arising from discovering where strengths and weaknesses lie.

They’re an anxious generation—of course and understandably. Yet sometimes I wonder why. Granted, we’ve given them a terrible world, but they’re also ready to tell you how much harder they have it, and each challenge can feel to them like too much on top of too much. I long for the student who asks me to be hard, who accepts struggle as fundamental to education.

None of what I’ve said diminishes my affection, but it doesn’t lessen my concern either. I generally don’t compare current students to historical ones. I know it could be my problem, my nostalgia for a past that never was. Maybe I shouldn’t speak at all, but there they are, right in front of me, every day.

Nuance-ing

“Nuance” isn’t a verb, though I heard it used as one recently. “We just haven’t nuanced the problem,” she said. My teacher-mind cringed. A second feeling chased the first, however. For the U.S., facing problems with so little thought, maybe we could use more nuancing.

I won’t try to write again about American anti-intellectualism—authors as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville have done so better than I—but I’ll describe five contemporary manifestations of the un-complications that plague us.

1. We’ve come to rely almost exclusively on one-size-fits-all-solutions. With hot-buttons particularly, we seek the simplest remedy. Gun advocates regard “gun control” as a guns-or-no-guns question. Because nuanced issues about abortions—how and when and if in what circumstances—suggest fine distinctions, some say we should ban them entirely.

More insidious is the collateral damage of good intentions. I can be momentarily generous and attribute good intentions to FCC chair Ajit Pai as he decries regulations as that, he says, discourage internet research and development, but ending net-neutrality, his one-size solution, seems a weed killer destined to take the lawn with it.

2. Part of our oversimplification arises from a desire to alleviate symptoms, not causes. Americans have a subject-object problem. They wish to treat opioid addicts without addressing the systemic origins of opioid addiction. They howl over individual instances of racism, sexism, and every other sort of bias but rarely get around to institutional forces proliferating them. The impoverished must solve poverty. If you’re feeling stressed by your circumstances, someone will help you deal with it. Just don’t try to cure its causes.

3. For simplicity’s sake, many Americans reduce groups like opioid addicts, immigrants, Democrats, or Republicans to monochromatic groups. A caravan racing from Guatemala must be bad hombres crashing our gates, and we’d prefer not to believe that those tiki-torch bearers, who appear otherwise conformist, yearn for white supremacy. It’s much too complicated to look closely at any one complicated member, never mind examining what subtle influences initiate and perpetuate socially and politically problematic attitudes.

4. Instead, we focus on individuals as emblems of broader concerns. We wish to believe our dilemmas might vanish if we could just get past the Trump presidency when, actually, Donald Trump may be the side effect of decades—and maybe centuries—of problematic American values. His removal may give hate and bigotry less credibility and a smaller megaphone, but what will happen to hate and bigotry?

And our obsession with emblems works the other way too. A figure like Martin Luther King can supply strict standards to complicated individuals with complicated circumstances. Being like MLK (or more accurately adhering to approved aspects of his thinking) can become a weapon to wield against dissent. Behavior like Trump’s or like King’s is aim or anathema, model or scapegoat. Either way it oversimplifies.

5. We look increasingly to humor or righteousness as a remedy, as if extremity substitutes for deliberation and verdicts or jokes are as worthy as science or rumination. Our laughter or pique is mostly confirmation, a pacifier to troubles we can know—and solve—only through contradiction and courage and disagreement and discussion. Yet it’s easier to assail enemies with oblique blows than to negotiate and/or reconcile.

In the end, you might dismiss my whining. I’m admittedly guilty of sweeping assumptions I rail against and, yes, have no answer myself. Before contradiction disqualifies me, however, let me defend myself. Solutions begin by identifying issues, though they may seem inconvenient or byzantine. We face so many troubles. Can we afford easy answers?