You shall be ordinary

When I was younger, I loved M. M. Kaye's lovely children's story, The Ordinary Princess. In it, one of the fairy-godmothers arrives late (and cranky) to the christening of the seventh daughter of the king (Amethyst, who later goes by Amy). The fairy looks over the impressive list of virtues that the child has already been endowed with, snorts, and says, "I'm going to give you something that will make you happier than all these fal-lals and fripperies put together. You shall be ordinary."(Or she says something like that--I don't have my copy at hand to check). And so Amy becomes ordinary--her lovely golden curls turn straight and mousy, her nose turns up, and her cheeks are dusted with freckles. But because she is ordinary, she learns how to have an adventurous life that ends up unexpectedly rewarding.

I laughed at the story, enjoyed the romance, and secretly felt rather smug. You see, I wasn't ordinary. Or so I thought. In high school, even in college (and on rare occasions, in graduate school) I had been told that I was smart. Articulate. (I once had a complete stranger stop me and marvel at how clearly I enunciated. It was a strange experience). And a good writer. Somehow, this combination of abilities made me feel as if I was an unusual quantity.

Sure, I knew I wasn't unique. There were lots of people who were smarter, more articulate, better writers. But I still thought I was special.

But recently I've made a disconcerting discovery. Because I'm still new enough to my community to not know lots of people, I've been spending a little more time in online communities (mostly places like Segullah and the Mormon Women Project). And maybe because these efforts tend to concentrate smart, articulate women who are also good writers, my perceptions may be a little skewed. But I've discovered that there are actually lots of Mormon women who share my favorite triumvirate of characteristics. And I mean LOTS. I always knew they were out there--I've met my share of them at school and in various wards. But I didn't realize there were so many of them. And while I realize that this is a good thing for the church, it's also kind of a sad thing for me.

It means that really I'm pretty ordinary; there's nothing particularly unusual about me or my abilities.

Even this blog, which I started as a place to solidify thinking that would otherwise stay sort of amorphous, isn't particularly deep, particularly profound, or particularly well-written. I won't be winning any literary awards with it.

But.

But.

All of this is humbling for me (always a good thing), but I'm still going to keep writing. I'm still going to think. And I'm still going to be articulate as I can be. I write because I enjoy it, because it makes me feel as though I and my life matter a little bit more. And I think because I can't help it. Even if I am more ordinary than not, I still have things to say, things to contribute, even if the scope is smaller than I may have once wished. (After all, my gifts are still gifts--if I was given two talents instead of five, that's still no excuse for squandering them.)

Besides, there are worse fates than being ordinary.

p.s.

As a post-script to yesterday's post, today I was reading a wonderful article on the church website (lds.org) by Terry Warner and his wife on helping young children recognize the spirit. Among other things, they include this telling quote by President Joseph F. Smith:

“You can’t force your boys, nor your girls into heaven. You may force them to hell by using harsh means in the efforts to make them good, when you yourselves are not as good as you should be. … You can only correct your children by love, in kindness, by love unfeigned, and reason” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1971, p. 317). This may require listening to children’s complaints or frustrations patiently while we fight the urge to force them to behave correctly. It may mean confessing our shortcomings to them and asking their forgiveness. It may cause us to weep with them over whatever has gone wrong. It may require that we leave what we are doing, however important we may think it is, and attend to our children’s needs.

Last fall I had a student in my class whose story broke my heart: he had grown up in an LDS home and then left the church, in large part (or so it seemed from his written descriptions) because his parents had tried to *force* him to church. Teaching my children to want to choose good through example and love seems infinitely harder than doing so by force, but the end results seem much more promising.

Agents unto ourselves

Agency is a funny thing. It was so important that God let Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, fall rather than coerce obedience. In theory, I can accept this idea quite easily--I like the idea that God will defend to the point of damnation my right to choose my own way.

But it's not always so easy in practice.

For one thing, there's always the question of how much of our own actions we control, how much of our actions or choices are the result of social conditioning. Some of the extremists that I read in graduate school would suggest that very little of what we do is really the result of our own free will. While I don't accept this--I think people are more complex than that--I do have to acknowledge that some degree of social conditioning influences me, particularly when my actions are more reflexive than thoughtful.

But more than that, I think my issue with agency is not really with the question of how much agency I have, but with the fact that accepting my own agency means accepting that other people have agency too.

That's the part I don't like as much.

My mission was really the first point in my life where I was confronted with other people's agency. Up to that point, I'd been able to accomplish pretty much anything I wanted in my life if I just worked hard enough. (School was nice that way.) But conversion doesn't work like that (and in my more honest moments, I have to admit that I wouldn't want it to work like that). People have to choose to be converted of their own free will--no amount of willing, working, or praying on my part made any difference. All I could influence was my own end of things: my efforts could help invite the Spirit, but that was about it. Everything else depended on the other person.

I learned that sometimes agency could be heart-breaking. I remember meeting with a sixteen-year-old girl. She was beautiful, in the way that so many young Hungarian women were, with clear skin, dark eyes, dark hair and just the slightest hint of mystery. She listened to our lessons (in English, because she wanted to practice), she clearly felt the Spirit, and she was eager to learn more. But she wept when we got to the law of chastity and confessed that she had slept with her boyfriend because she didn't believe he would love her if she didn't. And despite our protestations that she deserved more than that, despite her own intense feelings of Catholic guilt, she couldn't find the strength to change. She was too afraid of not being loved. Eventually, she stopped meeting with us.

Sometimes agency is difficult. Sometimes we'd rather not choose. I still remember reading Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. In it, Christ returns unexpectedly during the Spanish Inquisition and the Grand Inquisitor accuses him of ruining everything. He tells Christ that the people don't want agency--they just want to be fed. If I remember right, he says something along the lines of: "If you'd loved them more, you would have given them less."

The Grand Inquisitor had it precisely wrong. It was precisely because Christ (and God) loved us that they gave us agency. They trusted us enough to let us get it wrong some of the time in the belief that ultimately we'd be better people for it. I believe this.

But somehow I don't seem to get it in practice, particularly with my kids. I can accept that other people have agency, even if I don't always like their choices. But why, having finally learned this home truth, do I so frequently find myself engaged in a battle of wills with my four-year-old, as if I could somehow compel him--by sheer force of will alone--to conform to my own wishes? Why do I so often find myself offering him choices that are not really choices, like you can do what I want or you can go into time out?

To be honest, I struggle with this. I know that a four-year-old is not--in many respects--equipped to deal with the full responsibility for his own life. Part of my job as a parent is to give my son enough choices so that he can learn about responsibility and accountability, but to also set appropriate limits. But sometimes I have a hard time differentiating from choices that teach responsibility, and choices that are really just about me trying to exert my own control over the situation. And I have a nagging suspicion that this will get even trickier as Andrew gets older.

So the question I'm currently puzzling over (and don't have a good answer to yet) is: How do I allow Andrew to be his own agent (in age appropriate ways)? How do I know when I'm letting him learn versus when I'm just trying to get my own way?

Death be not proud . . .

I found out Monday morning (via Facebook, of all places) that a colleague of mine from my time at BYU, Gary Hatch, had passed away unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. The shock of it momentarily took my breath away--after all, he was only 45, a good 14-15 years younger than my parents. And plus, for someone like me who has a genetic blood-clotting disorder, the thought of a pulmonary embolism made my own mortality so much more vivid.

I can't seem to stop thinking about his death, not only because he was a good man and a sound scholar who will be missed on many levels (his family, certainly, but also the university and rhet/comp fields), but because of all the things his death (anyone's death, really) leaves undone. One of the most poignant examples of this, to me, is his to-read list on Goodreads. For anyone unfamiliar with this site, Goodreads is a kind of social networking site for book-lovers, allowing you to share book recommendations and reviews with "friends" and to keep track of your own reading. I was "friends" with Gary and found him to be one of the most regular and prolific posters of my online friends. In particular, he was assiduous about noting the books that he meant to read. When he died, he had nearly 1200 books in his "to-read" list. Now, I don't know exactly what Heaven looks like, or whether he'll have a chance to read these books there (chances are, he'll have better things to do), but this list reminds of how easily death interrupts the trajectory of life and its plans.

I'm sure, if he were asked, the list of books he's read are among the least of the accomplishments he hopes to leave behind. For me, it's interesting about how the question of death puts my own priorities into focus--if I knew that I were going to die soon, what would I be concerned about? Would I worry about teaching and research? Almost certainly not. About writing? Maybe, but only because I'd like that writing to speak to my family (especially my children) when I was gone. Mostly, I think I'd be concerned that my family--my children in particular--know that I loved them. I should say, I don't expect to die anytime soon (but then, who knows?) but I did want to note here, at least semi-publicly, how important my family is to me.

When I pass away, I hope that somewhere, among the glorified list of things I have done, it reads prominently that I loved my children well. Even if I don't get around to all the other things on my to-do list.

What about you? What do you most want to be remembered for?

Robes of the false priesthood?

Hugh Nibley is famously said to have told BYU graduates at a commencement that they were wearing the robes of the false priesthood (If I wasn't feeling lazy I'd actually try to look up the exact quote). At any rate, I couldn't help thinking of this today as we lined up in the cold to watch the incoming ranks of SUU's 2010 graduates.

I've spent a little bit of time since then (in between being exasperated at my children) puzzling over my response. A little bit of me was nostalgic for my own graduation; a bit of me was moved by the promise inherent in graduation--empty pomp and circumstance, false priesthood or no, it's one of our few remaining collective social rituals. But mostly, I was jealous.

Not of the graduates--I had that moment in the limelight. No, as I struggled to keep my unruly children in line (Andrew kept pushing himself in between the robed faculty and almost got trampled twice by trying to run in front of students to get to his dad, who was lined up on the side of the sidewalk facing us), I found myself mostly envious of the faculty, looking dignified and imperious in their robes. Even though I know these people are just individuals, there's something about the regalia . . . And I suppose a part of me resented the fact that any onlooker to the scene would see me just as a mother of small children--children I wasn't even keeping in very good order--but I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had the same degree as most of the faculty there. Pride, I know. And I know too that there's probably deeper messages I could be taking away from this scene (for one, the annoying quote my high school biology teacher had posted on his wall, "You give up the right to complain about that which you have chosen"). Those very children who identify me to outsiders are accomplishments that I value more than my dissertation (most of the time).

But the part of me that identified itself (and to a degree, still does) as an academic for so long was jealous, and wistful. After all, I never did get to go to my own PhD graduation (because the ceremony was across the country and my two-week-old baby was still in the NICU). And the robes do look impressive.

The Narcissism of Reading

In my first post I talked about finding myself in Middlemarch; recently, I’ve been finding myself in Stegner’s Angle of Repose. I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to read this book—in all honesty, I’m surprised no one on my dissertation committee told me to read it. (The friend who invited me to her book club said she thought I’d like it, because it sounded like my dissertation. And in fact, when I read it, I couldn’t help thinking how perfectly the novel illustrated some of the issues of place that I grappled with. And I still think that Mary Hallock Foote—the real-life model for Susan Burling Ward in the novel—might be an ideal candidate for a future chapter of this dissertation, should it evolve into a real book project. But I digress.)

For those of you who aren't familiar with the novel, it essentially tells the story of two marriages: the failed marriage of Lyman Ward, the narrator, who from the perspective of a crippled almost-sixty-year old historian attempts to piece together the story of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a talented nineteenth-century writer and illustrator. He is not, as he tells his assistant, so much interested in the history of Susan Ward, as he is in understanding what happened to her relationship with his grandfather, Oliver. In retelling her story, he carefully maps out the ways that living in the West at times strengthened and at times tested their relationship.

Perhaps most obviously, I see myself in Susan Ward, in her desire to be refined, her yearning after the intellectual life and all that it represents for her. (Although it might be more accurate to say that I see in her a younger version of myself; I think my yearning after the intellectual life was somewhat tempered by graduate school. Unlike Susan Ward, I’ve also learned to respect other ways of life that aren’t so bound up in the life of the mind.) I can even see myself, a little, in her perpetual struggle to appreciate her husband’s gifts. Where Susan Ward was a talented, thoroughly refined lady, her husband was evolving into a true westerner—a smart man, sure, but a quiet one, a man more likely to work out his frustrations than talk about them. Here, though, I think our differences also emerge—if I was initially unsure about Dan because he wasn’t the intellectual I’d always vaguely imagined I’d marry, I have long-since learned that his other abilities, like his groundedness, are much more important qualities for a healthy marriage. (Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might resent the limelight I’d have to share with a more intellectually-leaning partner.) But the similarities, tenuous though they might be, were enough to draw me into the novel, where I fell in love with the gorgeous prose, the thoughtful and generous narrative voice, and the vivid evocations of nineteenth-century places.

This particular experience with reading has made me think more about my (our) motivations for reading. What is it that we do when we read? What are we in search of? Even in the books that we are somehow compelled to read, I can’t think that the experience of reading is simply passive—we don’t simply let the words slide across our eyes. Even in the most mundane or driveling prose, I think we search (consciously or subconsciously) for something.

In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis’s character tells a struggling student that “we read to know that we are not alone.” (According to Bruce Young, the BYU professor who taught my senior course on Lewis, Lewis himself never actually said this. But it sounds like something he should have said). I think this is true—the books that I like best are books that do something for me—entertain me, move me. But the very best of books are those in which I find myself somehow reflected, able to see myself in a particular character, or—better still—able to find new truths about my own life from the narrative truths of someone else’s life. I read—and I enjoy reading—because reading connects me to a world larger than my own immediate frame of reference. I read, in fact, to remind myself that I am not alone. A friend from graduate school frequently calls his research “me-search,” because the questions that we explore often matter to us precisely because they are in some way or shape personal.

This tendency to find myself in the novels I read is an inherently narcissistic tendency, and one that I find difficult to avoid. I’m not sure that we can help this kind of narcissistic lens. I’m not sure, ultimately, if I even should try to avoid it—for one thing, such unnatural contortions would make it extremely difficult for me to enjoy reading. For another thing, my own perspective is, in the final analysis, the most coherent perspective I have available for analysis. In the most recent book I read (one of Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series), the main character finds herself thinking about what it would be like if we were able to record all of our thoughts for a day. She reflects, somewhat despondently, that most of those thoughts would likely be selfish, but then wonders if that is really a bad thing. After all, our own lives and views are the most easily-accessed framework we have available for interpreting our experiences. . I would add, too, that most of us find our own lives and needs fairly engrossing. While we can access other frameworks (and this is what most of us do when we engage in literary criticism), those frameworks will always be, to some extent, foreign.

Some might argue that other ways of reading are somehow higher, more valuable—that is, we need to somehow divest ourselves of personal agendas in order to truly appreciate what we read. Me, I’m not sure that’s ever possible. While I can imagine some other ways of reading (like applying a particular theoretical lens), I’m not sure I can imagine any way—even a theoretical lens—that still isn’t, in some way, a reflection of myself. Does this ultimately make me just incredibly narcissistic? Or just realistic?

What about you? How do you read? What motivates you when you read a book? What do you look for?

currency of talk

Talking is a funny thing. As a woman (or maybe just as a human, but I think that generally speaking, more women are invested in talking than men are), I find talking necessary to my health and mental well being (I'm thinking especially of a recent NYT article that suggests that meaningful conversations are linked to happiness). And as a rhetorician, of course, I'm fascinated by the different uses and functions of talking: cementing political agreements, filling empty air, developing relationships (friendship and romantic), setting people at ease, exploring ideas, exchanging information--the uses are seemingly endless.

If the uses of talk are varied, so too are the values we assign to it. I think as a society we tend to spend our talk pretty freely, despite the fact that talking can on occasion have costly consequences. I try (most of the time) to weigh my words--not, unfortunately, always out of consideration for the potential consequences, but because I think that I get measured by my words, that people assess my intelligence (among other things) by how eloquently I can put my words together. But even then, I sometimes find myself talking just to fill space (my dad once quipped that "Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Rosalyn).

I suppose I'm thinking about talking right now because I spent most of last night talking, in two different social situations. In the first, I was invited to a book club discussion of Stegner's Angle of Repose (more on that later) by an old college friend of Dan's. This meant that I found myself in a room full of relative strangers (even the one I knew I didn't know well) who were gathered together in order to, well, talk. Because the environment was unfamiliar (my initial impression of the house--a large, newly built, expensively decorated home--was rather intimidating), I found myself weighing my words--and the words of others--more carefully than I normally would. And I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with what I found. In retrospect, I think I was too careful to say things that would sound smart without sounding *too* smart. And I'm not exactly happy with my initial judgment of the other women based on what they said. My initial, snap judgment was that most of the women there were the sort of conventional Mormon women whom I can admire but don't generally have much in common with aside from our shared faith (a judgment, I admit, drawn partly from their negative reactions to the main character, with whom I strongly identified on occasion). It wasn't until much later in the conversation that I realized that some of the comments, although not phrased as eloquently as my grad school peers could have phrased them, were actually quite perceptive.

In contrast to this weighted and measured talk (although I have to admit that the weighing was mostly on my part--I think the others, through long association with each other, were more generous in their talking--both less careful of their own words and less critical of others), I spent the next two hours of my evening talking with three other women (my neighbor generously invited me to her bi-monthly gathering of close friends just to talk) whom I've known for longer and no longer fear judgment from. Although this second gathering was much easier for me (the talk was less costly), I find myself still thinking about why so many women schedule time to gather with other women expressly for the purpose of talking. What is it about talking that matters so much to us? Why is talking about ideas so linked to personal happiness? Why do we care so much about talking as a vehicle for ideas, judging others on the grace or ineptitude of their vehicle, often with more severity than we do the idea itself?