One of the first assignments I gave in my English composition classes at the College of Idaho was a one-page autobiography. It was a good way to get to know my students, and it confronted them with a crucial writing skill: knowing what to put down on the page and what never to reveal to anyone. It showed them how audience was the most important part of writing, because when I handed back their life stories, I would offer to bump them up a grade if they were willing to read them aloud to the class. No one wanted to introduce themselves to their classmates with the same words they had introduced themselves to their professor.
If I wanted to make the assignment even more difficult, I told the class they had to tell the truth. “Imagine you’re a witness in a murder trial. If you lie and get caught, you’ll go to jail for perjury. If you lie and get away with it, an innocent person will go to prison and a murderer will go free. Weigh every sentence you write for its burden of lies.”
“You can lie by omission,” I said. “You can lie by choosing only the facts you like. You can lie outright. You can lie to yourself and believe it. You can lie to get yourself out of trouble, although chances are, you’ll get in bigger trouble.”
“Sometimes when people eliminate all the lies in their life stories,” I said, “they end up with nothing to write about.”
I confess that the truth assignment did one other thing: it caused the dull and unimaginative students to drop out of my comp classes and take somebody else’s.
The depth psychologist Carl Jung began his autobiography at age eighty-one, and it ran more than a page. Titled Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it was published five years later, six months after his death.
He chose to compose his life story from the inside. Internal events—his psychic milestones—dictated the story’s structure. External events reflected what was going on inside him, not the other way around.
When you’re eighty-one, what’s important is not what’s important when you’re eighteen. I didn’t know that at eighteen, so I was lucky to read Memories, Dreams, Reflections for an autobiography class during my first year at Harvard College.
It was a revelation to read Jung and learn that what happens below the level of consciousness dictates what you do in life. It made sense to me, despite the lie I was telling myself at the time, which was that I was eighteen and could do anything I wanted.
I was, instead, doing what a bunch of other people wanted me to do, and it was a matter of life and death not to disappoint them. That sense of obligation—and the draft—kept me at Harvard when if I’d been really free I would have dropped out in those first few months in a cold and unfriendly city, where screaming antiwar protestors disrupted my college classes and where the vastness of the Harvard course catalog made it clear I would never know everything I needed to know.
Jung’s autobiography took some of the pressure off. It made it clear that family expectations stayed with you for life, and that however much your ego thought it was in control, other parts of your psyche—the collective unconscious, the self, the superego, the shadow, the gods and goddesses, Mr. Dumb Luck—were really running your life.
The you that you thought you were, the hero of your barely begun story, was powerless in the face of these internal buddies.
I didn’t like the idea of not being in control, but now, in my seventies, I look around at friends and acquaintances and their lives look like monuments to their unconscious impulses.
Harvard fell apart while I was there. Classes were cancelled after the Kent State killings and everyone was sent home. Transcripts were marked pass-fail, and everybody passed. I went home to work for the Forest Service. I saved four thousand dollars during fire season, and put it all in a cashier’s check and gave it to the registrar when I got back to Cambridge. I had made it through the previous year’s required math and science classes with my automatic passes, which had saved my butt.
I gave up on a well-rounded liberal arts education and started enjoying myself. I majored in English, where my skill at writing could substitute for a lack of knowledge. I graduated with honors, but almost everybody graduated with honors. Harvard, traumatized by protest, didn’t want to offend anyone.
I went back to Idaho under no illusions that I was educated.
Fifty years later, I still have no illusions that I’m educated. Education, for me, has been a never-ending process, because everything I learn exposes more and more of the world I don’t know. My internal horizons stretch beyond the scope of any internal passport, and there are days when, without Wikipedia, I wouldn’t know anything for sure.
Harvard’s ego collapsed during the late Sixties. It had trained the architects of the postwar order, and that order was dying in Vietnam. Henry Kissinger went from teaching Harvard students to advising Nixon to carpet-bomb Hanoi. Students claimed he was a war criminal. (Later events in Chile and Argentina gave heft to their assertions.) Harvard faculty were deemed guilty by association, and many of them were.
Students dropped out of school and went to Canada or refused to go to law or med school, disappointing their parents even more than they had when they talked of destroying the government. A lot of us, who didn’t know what to think, opted for a pox-on-all-your-houses separate peace, something that from my current perspective looks like moral cowardice.
It could have been worse. Had I gone to Harvard when it had its traditional confidence in its own story, I might have believed I was part of that story. I might have taken advantage of the institutional patina and claimed a job in Boston’s financial industry.
Instead, I went back to Idaho and started teaching, even though my concept of academe was a little like Dorothy’s when she first spied the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
Every five years since 1972, Harvard has solicited the autobiographies of my classmates for a class report. They print the stories we send to them in a book. This summer they asked for a fiftieth-year update. I wrote mine—a page—in September.
Most people, over the years, have written far more. Class reports have varied in size depending on how badly their authors needed to explain their last five years. People in their forties and fifties had much to explain, usually when they were in the middle of divorces. A lot of people who were cant-spouting revolutionaries when they were twenty needed to explain why they were cant-spouting conservative lawyers and doctors and hedge funders when they were fifty. Classmates who served in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had lots to explain. (Ty Cobb worked as Trump’s lawyer in the last five years. He may require a book of his own this time around.)
In the forth-fifth anniversary report, a surprising amount of people were taking care of spouses with early-onset dementia. Lots of people had retired early due to health. Lots of people were deep into psychotherapy, either as clients or practitioners. More than a few people had died since their last entry. Grief outweighed happiness if you read between the lines.
With that caution, I’m sharing my page for this fifty-year class report. I picked up where I left off five years ago, but this time I wrote it for my classmates as they presented themselves in previous autobiographies. Even as late as five years ago, they were idealistic, angry, smart, ambitious, and believed in free will. If they were wealthy, they believed they deserved to be. Most of them had no idea that the story they told about themselves was, in all likelihood, a lie.
I tried my best to tell everybody, even myself, the truth:
I did publish my end of the world book before the world ended. The University of New Mexico Press brought it out just before the March 2020 pandemic lockdowns. As prophecy, it is passable: I wrote at length on the ability of Americans to reliably supply magical thinking in the face of bad news, and predicted that a dramatic erosion of American decency, civility, and critical thinking would supply the bad news.
In lieu of a book tour, I began writing a weekly journal of the plague year, titled it End Notes, and ended up in March of 2021 with a hundred thousand words of primary source material. It’s a weird artifact, as you might expect of any detailed explanation of what the world looks like from rural Idaho, no matter what the year. Just recently, I began writing a second journal of the second plague year, this time titled Ghost Dance, after the idea that as a civilization, we’re attempting to roll up the last four decades and expose the better world that still exists, in our collective memory, beneath it. One wonders what form Wounded Knee will take this time.
Julie and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on August 17. We hosted a small dinner for a few vaccinated friends. Julie did her usual magnificent performance in the kitchen. We toasted friendship, long-term happiness, a good and growth-inducing marriage, and—with trepidation—the years ahead.
We wondered how 25 years could go by so quickly. We wondered at the wisdom of being so deeply interwoven with an unsustainable civilization. Not for the first time, we wondered at the too-close connections between love and grief, ambition and grief, excess and grief.
Five years ago I wrote that we were raiding the dessert cart on the Titanic, and it is with some incredulity that I note that Julie and I, the dessert cart, and the Titanic are still above water. The band plays on, for the moment drowning out the screams from steerage.
Ghost dances and the Titanic make for bleak metaphors, but it’s hard to find a metaphor that properly reflects the bleakness of what’s ahead. As nearly as I can tell, we’ve passed tipping points for lethal climate change, vital resource depletion, and economic and cultural breakdown. Given that the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth was published in the spring of our senior year, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Greta Thunberg has become the avatar of a new generation, and it’s hard to see that her barely-contained rage at our unconscious incompetence will lessen in the years ahead. To put it another way, you may not be murdered by your own grandchildren, but you stand a chance of being murdered by somebody’s grandchildren.
I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence, especially since Julie and I are hoping to attend the 50th reunion in June. I promise to refrain from ranting in polite company. But as we gather, we may wish we’d understood that the system that had been so good to us was destroying the world, and that no matter how radical we thought our thinking was fifty years ago, it wasn’t radical enough. I’m looking forward to seeing all you old people, but it will be difficult not to put a sepia overlay on the experience.
God willing, Julie and I and Mr. Dumb Luck will be at Harvard this June, aged and wandering, looking for young people to give unsolicited advice to, trying not to look like we’re in an old photograph. I won’t tell any Harvard students that these are the best years of their lives, even though I know that what wasn’t true for me might be all too true for them. I might tell them that education doesn’t end with a diploma, and I might tell them that to be truly happy they should make friends with the creatures of their unconscious.
“There’s one now,” I’ll say to the young people. I’ll point to Mr. Dumb Luck, grinning in the shadows. “The last, best hope for your world is that he can be in so many places at once.”
“Go over and introduce yourself,” I’ll say. “Tell him I sent you.”