The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

And we consume our lovers, of course, as we know the world by mouth.

  “By mouth” means to use our lips and tongues to touch, but also to speak, to name.

  To consume as in tasting. Or as in absorbing, taking on their characteristics or vital energy.

  Historians disagree about Whitman’s sexual life; some suggest that he had actual congress with few, or none. I doubt that very much, though the evidence for my claim is based on feeling, on the rich and tender erotic force of the poetry, which seems to me composed out of the knowledge of skin. I would like to think he touched men, as he would say “long and long,” and I would like to believe—of him and of myself—that this deep and attentive touching was a necessary sort of research, that his poems could not have come swimming into being from any other source but physical love, which he did not distinguish from the spiritual kind.

  Great poets are, by definition, undead. The voice is preserved in the warm saline of ink and of memory. It cannot fade; time cannot take away a word of it. The personality, as it breathes through the preserved voice back into the world, is unmistakable: Walt Whitman sounds like no one else. And of all poets, he seems to have understood in the most uncanny of ways that his audience did not yet exist.

  He was creating it, in his poems, summoning readers into being who could receive what he had to say. This is most clearly stated in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a poem that has never failed to make me shiver, though I have read it countless times. Where is the speaker in the poem? On the ferry where in a few years the Brooklyn Bridge will stand, yes, in his own time, but also strangely present in our moment:

  It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not,

  I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many

  generations hence,

  I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

  Later in the poem, he returns to this sort of performative speech, willing himself outside of time—or is it further into it?—approaching his readers in their present moment, as if pushing upward through the skin of the page itself:

  Closer yet I approach you,

  What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my

  stores in advance,

  I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.

  Who was to know what should come home to me?

  Who knows but I am enjoying this?

  Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you

  cannot see me?

  There is perhaps one other poem like this in English, a fragment by John Keats that begins: “This living hand . . .” Who else would dare to speak this way, to write themselves into the condition of deathlessness?

  Of the many poems that demonstrate Whitman’s daring, “Trickle, Drops” is in its way the strangest. He placed it in the yearning, homoerotic Calamus sequence, for good reason, and I used to think it the creepiest page in Leaves of Grass. But in the light of Stoker, I begin to see it differently indeed, though I admit it still makes my skin crawl a little. Who’s the vampire here?

  O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,

  Candid, from me falling—drip, bleeding drops,

  From wounds made to free you whence you were prisoned,

  From my face—from my forehead and lips,

  From my breast—from within where I was concealed—

  Press forth, red drops—confession drops,

  Stain every page—stain every song I sing, every word I say,

  bloody drops,

  Let them know your scarlet heat—let them glisten,

  Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet,

  Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,

  Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

  With his characteristic, canny strangeness, Whitman has done what no one else would have thought to do. He’s made the reader the vampire, feasting on the poems, which here expose, in their fierce confessional heat, the poet’s naked life. And where “you,” Whitman’s ubiquitous second person, is nearly everywhere in his work, the reader he wishes to seduce and to claim, here he speaks, for once, to his own blood. He feeds it to us. I feel—as indeed he must have wanted his readers to feel—that he feeds it to me. How could I refuse him?

  MARK EDMUNDSON

  Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?

  FROM The Oxford American

  WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS: getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.

  It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.

  You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.

  Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.

  I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. I was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be prelaw,” I told my father. I had no idea what being prelaw was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragonlike, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I told him, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”

  My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, prelaw would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalogue. “How about the science requirements?”

  “Take ’em later,” he said. “You never know.”

  My fathe
r, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Malden High School class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the score. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone else—students, teachers, and trustees and parents—sees the matter much differently. They have it wrong.

  Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? America values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most for them is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those backbreaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

  In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.

  The faculty, too, is often absent: their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says, this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

  This is radically false. Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intensive. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest: their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: that the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

  The students and the professors have made a deal: neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

  No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.

  As for the administrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible. The student will sue your eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cell phone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.

  Still, this was small potatoes. Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

  You’ll find that cheating is common as well. As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: if the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year, it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.

  Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

  One of the reasons professors sometimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, he’s not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.

  What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing. They’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding rec­ord—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.

  In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?

  The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isn’t really what matters. In five years (or five months, or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, studen
ts will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

  All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesn’t the content of the courses matter at all?

  On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your life changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc. After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

  So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: the professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

  So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.