Escape from the Tower

"I am a displaced person." This is how Alice Walker begins an essay that introduces a collection of her poems published in 1991. In the rest of the essay, Walker shares the peace and comfort she feels in her current home in northern California, as well as the complex and confused feelings she has for her childhood home in Georgia. As I stood discussing this text with my class of bewildered, young freshmen earlier this year, I started to cry. Yes, you read correctly. I felt myself begin to break down as I read, "O landscape of my birth, / you have never been far from my heart. / It is I / who have been far. / If you will take me back, / know / I am yours,” and Walker's powerful lament touched a secret part of me. Of course, I identify with the author's California Dream and nostalgia for her Southern home, but it is much more than that. You see, "The Place Where I was Born" is not just an essay about geography. On the page I see the echoes of her tears as Walker charts a course of self-discovery. It is a record of her struggles to accept that she has lied to herself for decades, pretending the landscape of her birth died, or drove her away, while in truth she left behind love when she fled from pain. I choked back my own tears, but I couldn't entirely conceal the catch in my voice. My students sat up, suddenly alert, grins on their faces. Their hopes were not met; I recovered my composure, and we moved on. But I had reached an epiphany in that moment. The emotion so transparent in every line of Walker's essay reminded me of a love for literature that I have forgotten or ignored for many years now. Every word, every description from this enchantress tore at my cynicism as my voice joined hers to apostrophize to the rounded hills and bubbling streams of the Southeast, but the landscape I long for is not merely a physical place; it is the realm laid down between the pages of some of my favorite books. The birth it witnessed was the birth of my mind as I inhabited these literary landscapes. But now, I study this terrain from the distant height of the Ivory Tower. Literary Criticism and discussion once gave me an enhanced appreciation for texts, but now it strides atop the ground, declaring itself the victor in a battle I had scarcely acknowledged was taking place. My landscape has become scorched earth, and I cried when reading Walker's essay because I, too, know how hard it is to acknowledge ones self-deception, how much easier it is to blame others. And like Alice Walker, now that "I have confessed how I have lied," I can admit that I want to return to the landscape of my birth.

The descent from the tower will not be an easy one. I have only just confessed my feelings, but I'm not claiming that they have just come up. I haven't liked my profession for a long time; I've just been in denial about it. I didn't want to go back to school when I applied to Ph.D. programs three years ago, but I told myself I would feel differently once I re-entered the hallowed halls. But I didn't, and I don't. For the past two years, I have gone through the motions. I do well in my classes, but I don't enjoy them, and I am involved with the program as little as possible. The truth is, I don't like the turn the liberal arts have taken in the past few decades. You don't see it much as an undergrad, but reading literature is not central to the profession anymore. That pursuit has been replaced by archive fever, intellectual masturbation, textual incest, profound cynicism, and literary theory with its "constructed realities," "discursive movements," "bodies without organs," and "always-already." What is more, anyone who thinks it shouldn't be this way is seen as hopelessly naive with no chance of being professionally successful. So I've pretended to think like they think. But I can't do that anymore. I hate it! And I want out.

The problem is that I've been an academic for so long that I haven't been able to see myself as anything else. This is what I do. This is who I am. The promise of "Dr. Mc" and "Professor Mc, Ph.D." kept me lying to myself. I maintained this fantasy that if I just got through my coursework I'd be OK. If I could just finish my classes, I would have a more flexible schedule, and I would be able to pursue my own interests again. I didn't know how I would write a dissertation, but I ignored that fear too, focusing on what would come after. I'd get a nice professorship at a small state college or university back east, and I could have my dream of being the passionate professor of life and letters, the students' friend, the guy who loves what he does. I wanted to be Mr. Keating. And Darling Wife and I would buy a house or a little farm and have kids, and it'd all be great. All this time, I read essays like this one, and I knew that I felt like the undergraduates in the author's theory class. (How many of you felt the same once, or still do?) And though I had many profs who, like this author, attempted to disillusion me, I persisted in believing, as he does in the end, that it would be all right eventually.

But it won't be all right. I'm nearly 34 years old. How many more years will I have to "just get through"? And then what? I'll be stuck in a profession that I no longer believe in. And it's not like it's a job you can coast through. It requires active engagement of the mind and will if you want to succeed. It requires a major investment of oneself. And unlike other jobs, there's no separation between work and home. Most people, even workaholics, go home sometime, and leave their work behind. But the academic life is a life of the mind. Work is always with you. Those much-envied long Christmas breaks and summers off are facades. They just mean you don't have to be on campus. The work goes on at home, in Europe, in the Rockies, or wherever you are. It never stops. Even while you are doing other things, the introduction to your next paper or the details of a text you are studying play inside your head at all times. IT NEVER STOPS!

Now I know that no job is perfect. Everyone has things they hate about their jobs. But it doesn't make sense to work so hard and give up so much for something I don't like. I can dislike a different job with much less effort and sacrifice involved. Then even if I hate my job, at least I can have a good home life.

So, I am seriously considering retiring from The Ivory Tower and getting a Masters in Library Science. This would entitle me to become a professional librarian instead of a paraprofessional, like I was before. I was happy at the library, and to be honest, I wouldn't make much less money than a professor's salary. I'll certainly have a whole lot less stress...unfortunately, a whole lot less prestige too, but I find I care about that less and less.

Of course, this is not a fait accompli. I've applied for a university exchange position to teach in Germany for the 2008-2009 academic year. (Not next year, but the one after) Darling Wife and I think it would be magnificent to live in Europe for a year and have the university pay for it. I'm waiting to hear if I got accepted before I make any final moves. If I get accepted, I'll tough it out next year and see how I feel after I get back from Germany. If I don't get accepted, I plan to withdraw from the program at the end of this year. But I'm so ready to run that I don't even know which I want to happen more.