Author Archives: Tin Man

Happy October 8

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Happy October 8.

In Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, the author, humorist Dave Barry, has a running joke that every important event in American history happened on October 8. (I think October 8 is actually his son’s birthday.) This book came out when I was in high school, and I remember my friends and I — including occasional commenter on this blog FI — reading it aloud and joking about it on our train ride to school. (Yes, we were all a bunch of dorks.)

So, happy anniversary of everything.

Law School

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In therapy last week, we decided to explore my time in law school. I seem to be haunted by it. I feel like there’s this piece of elastic that constantly pulls me back to 1999, the year I graduated and left Virginia for good.

I told her a story that I hadn’t told her before. And I’d forgotten how sad and angry the story made me.

I got through three years of law school at the University of Virginia without putting down any roots, without leaving any fingerprints behind, without leaving any evidence that I was ever there. I made no good friends. I didn’t become close with any of my professors. I didn’t join any law school organizations. I tried out for two law journals and didn’t get picked. I was intimidated by everyone at law school, students and professors alike. I rarely spoke up in class unless called upon. When I’d been younger, I could take solace in knowing that if I wasn’t cool, I was at least smart. But in law school, everyone seemed cooler than me and smarter than me. I had nothing going for myself.

I was a ghost.

My grades didn’t help, either. At UVa Law, as in many law schools, courses are graded on a very broad curve. (Your grade is based on a written final exam.) About half the students in every class will get a B plus. You don’t get higher or lower unless you do very well or pretty badly. Me, I got a mix of B pluses and Bs, and in a couple of classes I got a little bit lower than that. No wonder my first-year law firm interviews never went well.

None of this made me feel any better about being in law school, of course.

There was, however, one class in which I got an A. It was a class in U.S. constitutional history up to the Civil War. I took the class during the fall semester of my final year of law school. I was thrilled when I got my grade. After all this time, I’d actually gotten an A! Maybe I wasn’t an idiot after all!

The thing is, the professor didn’t know me. It was a class of about 100 people. During each class session, there were three or four students “on call,” meaning that they could expect to be called on during that hour. Professor Harrison went down the roster alphabetically, so you had a general idea of what day your name was coming up. I had actually kind of looked forward to the day I’d be on call. Now, I can’t remember if he wound up not asking any questions on the day I was on call, or if he was out sick that day and forgot to pick up the list in the same place when he came back, or what, but for whatever reason, I never got called on.

So a couple of days after I got my fall grades — a few weeks into the spring semester — I decided I would try to get to know him. He was a little pompous, but I thought I should get to know at least one of my law school professors, and why not the guy who’d given me an A? I could let him know I’d gotten an A in his class and ask him what I’d done right so that I could apply it to other classes. Of course, I knew the reason I’d done so well on the exam was because it hadn’t been a typical law exam where you apply legal principles to a set a facts, so there was really no way to apply it to my other classes, and I worried that that’s what he would tell me. But I couldn’t just say to him, “Hi, I got an A in your class. Please like me!” So I needed a pretense.

That afternoon I saw him walking down the hall carrying a few books and notebooks. I took a deep breath, determined to swallow my fear. I walked over to him and said:

“Professor Harrison, are you on your way back to your office?”

He replied, in a cold, irritated voice:

“No, I’m on my way to class.”

“Oh — sorry,” I said.

And he continued walking down the hall, leaving me behind.

My face and neck turn red with embarrassment.

I never tried to speak to him again.

I told that story to my therapist last week, and I felt my eyes well up a little as I told it.

She said it was interesting to ponder the possibilities. What if he’d just been a little bit friendlier to me instead of dismissive? What if I’d been a little braver or forthright?

Maybe nothing would have happened. It was too late in my law school career to change anything. But maybe I would have been able to stop by his office and have a conversation with him. Maybe it would have been just one conversation, but maybe that one conversation would have made my day. Maybe I could have gotten a recommendation letter from him in my subsequent job search.

Instead, he dismissed me like a worthless ant because he had no idea who I was. And I was too intimidated to try again.

I’ve always felt bitter about that.

Just another reason why law school sucked.

Time

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I adore history. It’s one of my passions, and I wish I could do something with it as a career.

I think one of the reasons I love history so much is that it makes me feel immortal.

I think about death a lot. I can’t help it. I can never seem to avoid the fact that my life isn’t permanent and that someday I will die. It terrifies and saddens me, and death often feels just around the corner. My life sometimes feels too empty — I don’t allow myself very many luxuries, material or otherwise. But I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect. Do I worry about my death because I don’t lead a rich enough life, or have I decided that it’s not worth trying to do or gain much in my lifetime because someday I’ll be dead? I probably have a good 50 years ahead of me, but I can’t seem to conceive of that length of time as very long. I feel like the last 10 years have flown by and I worry that the rest of my life will, too.

Yes, I really do think that way. This is what it’s like inside my head sometimes.

But I know that after I’m gone, history will still exist. And by studying history, I’m giving life to those who are long dead. When I study history, I feel like I’m communing with something permanent — unlike me, who will someday disappear. Studying and contemplating history feels almost spiritual to me.

For the last few weeks I’ve been reading Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson. It’s an intellectual history of humanity from the advent of bipedalism and stone tools to the dawn of the 20th century. (Watson has another book that covers the intellectual history of the 20th century.)

I’d like to think I’m learning a lot from this book, but I know that most of it is just washing over me, to be forgotten a few pages later. Still, I’m really enjoying it, because I’m getting a big-picture view of the trends of human history.

One of the weirder things I remember learning a long time ago is that we are currently living in a interglacial period in the middle of an ice age. The last 12,000 years have just been part of a warm respite in the middle of a longer ice age. All of recorded human history has occurred during an interglacial period.

It makes me wonder, what kind of age are we living in now? It depends on your altitude. Are we in the age of Obama? Or are we in a longer era of conservatism that began with Ronald Reagan? Pulling back from the ground a bit, are we in an age of democracy that began in the late 18th century, an era that we take for granted but will someday disappear? Or are we an age of individualism, humanism, and exploration that began with the Renaissance and will also disappear? Or maybe we’re in an age of monotheism that began a few thousand years ago?

Several hundred years or several millennia from now, what will people say about our era? Will the early 21st century be distinguishable from the 19th or the 20th or the 22nd or the 23rd? Or will we blend into some several-centuries-long period of time? Will future people even know about us?

Maybe all of human history is just a transitional phase. Maybe we’re just a vehicle for the creation of self-aware robots that will kill us and colonize the universe. Maybe they are the ultimate point of things. Or maybe they’ll use their unimaginably awesome intelligence to create even more amazing robots, and so on, until some super-super-duper species of computer ultimately discovers the purpose of Existence.

It’s common to look at the Earth and realize that we, and the Earth, and our solar system, are insignificant in the universe. But it’s not just a spatial insignificance; we’re temporally insignificant as well. The universe existed long before the Earth was formed and long before the Sun. It will exist even after the Sun goes supernova and swallows the Earth. That moment of supernova is inconceivably far into the future — but the universe will continue even after that.

Time is so… long.