I wrote this piece for the inaugural issue of Garage magazine, a while back. You’ll notice a few references that date it, but I hope you won’t mind that I didn’t find new ones.) I’d almost forgotten about this piece until Saturday, when the conversation in our writing group turned to the topic of failure: fear of failure and fear of success. I’ll have a guest post on that subject in a few weeks, if all goes according to plan—I’m looking forward to reading it myself.
Imagine a painter. Well, he calls himself a painter, but most who see his work think he’s not very good at it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t draw well. He’s committed, at least; the poor sod refuses to consider doing anything else with his life. Fortunately, his father is prepared to support him with a minimal allowance. He hangs out with other, much more successful painters, which must be galling. Decades pass, during which he trades the odd painting for the odd dinner, but that’s about it.
You’d probably call this man a failure. In fact, his name was Paul Cézanne.
It’s nice to think that we might have been sentient enough to recognize Vincent van Gogh’s prodigious talent, even though the world was so unaccountably blind to it. Likewise, Beethoven and Hendrix were simply ahead of their time. But what of someone like Cézanne, whose failure wasn’t an accident of cultural misjudgment but seemingly a condition of his being? You’d probably have pitied him and advised him to get a real job, in accounting or the law. Or bartending.
Would you have known that the hippie dropout would turn into Steve Jobs, or the Yale flunk-out into Vice President Dick Cheney? That Joanne R., the single mother on welfare, would become J. K. Rowling? Charles Darwin recalled that as a boy his father and teachers thought him “rather below the common standard of intellect." Einstein, famously, didn’t speak till he was four and was expelled from school repeatedly; everyone assumed has was mentally handicapped. The young Thomas Edison was told by his teachers that he was too stupid to learn anything, and by his employers that he was not productive enough. Walt Disney was fired as a journalist for lacking imagination.
These are comforting stories. It seems to follow that if J. K. Rowling can fail like me, then I can succeed like J. K. Rowling. In her Harvard commencement address, Rowling describes how the failure of marriage and job stripped away the inessential and focused her on what really mattered; showed her who her friends were; and gave her permission to follow the idea that consumed her imagination, of a boarding school for wizards. She was set free by the sense that she had no further to fall. The pill—the truism that everybody fails sometimes—is easier to swallow when we can see, in retrospect, the fulfillable promise of success. But once the adrenaline rush of encouragement has gone, we’re left with the same existential ache. Thousands of impoverished single mothers don’t have a brilliant idea and a storyteller’s talent. Thousands of college dropouts aren’t technological geniuses. Thousands of painters who plod on year after year, decade after decade, don’t turn out to be Cézanne. The chances are that we’re in that crowd.
Yet still the Mephistophelian Internet promises success to the masses: Googlo—or rather, googlor, the passive, “I am googled”—ergo sum. When the bounds of renown are infinitely expanding, we’re deluded into expecting that there’s room for us all. When, in the dark night, we step off our furious wheel of striving, we suffer the twenty-first century’s existential torment: I think I am somebody, but what if I am not? Do I really make a sound if no stranger has heard of me?
I’ve stood in bleeding silence while work that I’ve given my heart to is excoriated by someone I’d hoped would champion it, and I’ve felt the baffled frustration of not being able to create in the physical world that thing that’s so clear in my head. I know the grinding panic of cowering under a looming pile of bills, borrowing capacity close to maxed out and no hope of more, the phone calls at ominous hours, the daily terror that this time they’ll say, “We’re taking your house.” I know the nausea of learning that the one you love loves someone else, and the tearing loss of the future when love is gone. For some reason I am mulishly convinced that there are people in the world who have never known these. How could the human race have survived this long if failure rains down like fire-bombs, engulfing us all? If, instead, it targets individuals with sharp, clinical sniper rounds, there must be some who escape unscathed.
Still, there’s no road sign saying “Welcome to Failure: over 7 billion served.” You’ll never know you’re there unless you tell yourself you’ve arrived. There is no concept of failure without a concept of success, ambition, goal; and no crucifying feeling of failure without the thought—the certain knowledge—that this relationship, and this relationship alone, means my lifetime’s happiness; that this job, and this job alone, means solvency, my child’s education, my standing in the world; that this achievement, this creative expression, constitutes the meaning of my life. Failure is not the thing itself; it’s what you make it mean. The enterprise, the relationship, has not turned out as expected and hoped for. One person will move on, and another will conclude, “I am a failure.”
Theoretically it’s possible to live your life so guardedly that failure is impossible--and that, as J. K. Rowling remarks, is the greatest failure of all. But is it possible in reality? Is it possible to have no goals, no ambitions, no idea of how you’d like to live or who you’d like to be? I don’t think so. A Buddhist strives for total detachment from the world, both its pleasure and its suffering—but even a Zen master must have failed in those terms many times.
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