No secret that academic employment is difficult to find these days. In the United Kingdom, it helps to be from the United Kingdom (or possibly the EU, albeit that seems to be rapidly changing–but it may or may not change forever, depending on what happens with Brexit). In the United States, it helps to have attended one of the small group of ‘elite’ universities, or to be already somehow on the inside track for the post, or to know someone (well) on the selection committee.
Oh, yes. And it helps to be below a certain age. If you’re over forty, and happen to be applying for a ‘junior’ faculty post, odds are against you (to put it mildly).
Not to take up the laments of the marginalised. The complaint is ever among us that people need to make a living. Need to house themselves. Need to eat. And, in the United States, need to pay exorbitant rates for health insurance, because health care costs run so high that one serious illness or injury can bankrupt a family into the far mists of even the vaguely foreseeable future.
Sacvan Bercovitch (who was Canadian, although he taught in the U.S., and at Harvard for most of his career) argued convincingly that the American identity derived in many ways from Puritanism–not just from the religious movement, but also from that movement’s social aspects. And there is still an idea of “hauling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”. Admirable, or is it?
A good work ethic is admirable, of course. Do your job and do it well. Young actors may lament when rehearsals run to overtime, while the more seasoned in a company are often grateful to have paid work in such a tenuous field.
Of course, this has its tragic side. Public funding is an example.
“I don’t want to pay taxes to support the arts. I pay enough to support defense and necessary things.” (Yes. I’ve heard someone say this.)
This seems like one perspective. One decision. There is an old Chinese saying about there being two ways to heaven. One is to soar there on the backs of flying dragons, and the other is to burrow in the mud like a worm.
Perhaps. Only life’s brevity remains our constant companion.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
Yes, sonnet 18 is quoted so frequently that it may make some early modernists roll their eyes. Yet, it is breathtaking. And that hope that art may capture something, immortalise something of the human experience, is truly grand.
At this time of year, many cultures honour their dead. Harvest brings thoughts of many harvests, of the seeming cyclical nature of life and the world. Winter’s coming (to paraphrase something from the immensely popular writer who resurrected the fantastic Jean Cocteau cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico). Or perhaps it is already here. Titania’s words in A Midsummer Night’s Dream take on new significance these days:
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original. (MND, 2.1.107-17)
Indeed, we seem to be. Where will all of this lead? Perhaps we will all feel a bit like Cardinal Wolsey at the moment of his downfall:
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventur’d,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth. (Henry VIII, 3.2.417-426)
One wonders if it is even a question of legacy. Whether we leave children, monuments, plays, poems, paintings, films, in the end (the long, perhaps long, long distant end), it may be onwards that matters. Where we go after this. What we might become. The legacy of grass. The directions of the wind. The movement of vast space, clockwork or not of the greater cosmos that we cannot really see.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (“Ozymandias” by Percy Blysshe Shelley)
The middle aged need work as much as younger workers do, and sometimes they may need it more. Additional years do not always remove the need to support oneself. What a pity that, in the U.S., it has become so much more difficult for all workers to earn a living at what they do. More than a pity. The undiscussed national tragedy.
People tend to pay attention to the magic show of politics and social turmoil, and they forget the magic of the budding branch, or the frost on the water. Financial headlines are quick to speak of record low unemployment. They do not as readily discuss the fact that so many, that most, of the ‘working’ people in the U.S. remain underpaid. That so many do not make enough to make ends meet within a system where lawmakers persistently refuse to address the serious social, educational, economic, and public health declines in any meaningful or effective way.
We wonder if the billionaires do not have enough. We wonder at the immense cost of defense in an age of saber rattling on so many sides. (Most people have not studied WWI in this day and age, and certainly not enough to remember that nationalism was one of the causes of the ‘war that bled Europe dry’.) Perhaps we need to spend trillions on an elaborate military industrial complex, that is so complex that the people don’t really have any idea what most of it does. Perhaps.
But if human life falls away, what is the point of any of it? The branch and birdsong may offer solace, but they do not offer sustenance. For that, we need reform on so many levels. And those who have not, or will not give us that reform, need to be voted out of office, and, in many cases, run out of the proverbial town on a rail.
