The Executor (5 page)

It was Father Fred who taught me these things. Through him I came to appreciate the thrill of rational dialogue, learning that even those who disagree can find wisdom in each other’s positions. Argument could create, rather than destroy; it did not have to be loud or end in tears. He took the white light of my hostility and passed it through the prism of reason, separating my emotions, giving them vector and function. Most of all, he never condescended to me, never gave pat answers or tried to put a rosy spin on what was, to me, obviously a miserable, vain farce of an existence.

The Greeks, Avicenna, Descartes, Kant—he showed me how to read them and reach my own conclusions. Together we spent afternoons listening to Anita O’Day LPs and locked in discussion, all the old questions, the ones that have always driven philosophy: What is real? What can we know? And how ought we to act? No matter how many times we had hashed over a subject, there were always new angles to consider, always more to read. He coached me on my college applications, wrote me a letter of recommendation, and lobbied my parents to roll over the money from Chris’s educational fund into mine, enabling me to aim higher than State. When I got into Harvard, he was the first person I called.

As the one to introduce me to Nietzsche, he readily appreciated the irony when I began to lose my faith. Still, he continued to treat me with respect. If anything, my atheism became a new and fruitful topic for discussion, because he wanted so badly to win me back. And though he never succeeded, he was proud of me for not having run from the confrontation. All he asked was that I continue to push myself. Philosophy, Plato has Socrates tell us, begins in wonder, and at that age I had much to wonder about, in contrast to my parents, for whom life had drawn the curtains.

PRACTICALLY THE ONLY THING capable of rousing my mother from her torpor was the battle over what happened on the night Chris died. It took years for the case to be closed, although it was never truly resolved.

The facts were these. After leaving the house, Chris drove to a gas station, where he was denied cigarettes after failing to produce proper ID. He then asked for the bathroom key, informing the clerk upon reemergence that there was something wrong with the toilet. It is possible—although speculative—that while the clerk left the register to investigate, Chris reached over the counter and swiped a pack; by the time police got around to asking for the CCTV video, it had been taped over.

Sometime after eleven, he turned onto Riverfront, which runs east before curving north and becoming the Crawhorn Bridge. A patrolman parked at the corner of Riverfront and Delcorte reported seeing the truck go by; he noticed because the driver’s window was open, one arm hanging out, never mind the cold.

Near the entrance to the bridge, along the right side of the road, the guardrail was partially down, having been mangled the day before by a snowplow. According to the county, orange hazard cones marked the spot where the asphalt dropped away toward the water. No cones were ever found, however, not on-site or in the river, so either the wind had carried them a considerable distance or, as seems more likely, careless workmen had neglected to put them out.

Police later determined that Chris took the curve at upwards of sixty miles per hour, far too fast to make that turn on ice. The pickup slid clean off the road and tumbled down the embankment, flipping once before landing on its side in the partially frozen water. It took a while for the cab to become fully submerged, and, if conscious, he should have had more than enough time to crank open the window and climb out. But when they pulled everything up, they found him still wearing his seatbelt.

Initially, the coroner ruled Chris’s death an accidental drowning. Four months later, this was revised to drowning resulting from a motor vehicle accident, with a probable indication of suicide. The general consensus was that the change came down from the county supervisor, who had taken heat in the local paper for his neglect of the guardrail and his failure to put out cones. Prior to that point, my parents hadn’t considered taking legal action, even turning away an attorney who had approached them offering representation. Now, however, my mother was outraged. She went on the warpath, motivated less by greed than by a need to refute the county’s unflattering judgment of my brother. Chris’s behavior had been erratic, but that didn’t make him suicidal. He was an inexperienced driver, and he might not have realized that he was going too fast. If he hadn’t gotten out of the truck, that was because he was unconscious; one needed only to look at the bruises on his forehead where it had smashed against the steering wheel. If he’d intended to kill himself, why go to such elaborate lengths? We had guns in the basement. Moreover, the guardrail had come down less than thirty-six hours before the accident. How could he have known to drive there, of all places? It didn’t add up. In another of her rare bold strokes, my mother called up the attorney and filed suit for wrongful death and negligence, thus beginning a six-year process that would eat up what scant reserves of spirit she had left.

Back then I sided with her, more out of loyalty than anything else. In years since, however, as I have devoted my attention to considering the ways in which people choose, I’ve grown leery of easy explanations. It’s possible that Christopher both did and did not intend to drive off the bridge. I will never know. These days, more than ever, I understand that nothing is more inscrutable than the human heart, and that no act, great or small, righteous or wicked, can be so named by one who stands outside the actor’s mind.

H
ere is what Harvard looked like to the eighteen-year-old me: it looked like a giant redbrick treadmill. What I remember most of my first few semesters is a vague sense of panic, my big-fish-small-pond confidence crumbling as I sprint to catch up. Nobody from my hometown had ever gone to Harvard; indeed, reactions to my big news ranged from bafflement (as in, Harvard University?) to skepticism (they let you in?) to downright hostility (too big for yer britches?). And the gaps in my education were daunting. I came from a public school where my biology teacher, a born-again Christian, could refuse to teach us the theory of evolution, choosing instead to spend twice as much time on molecular biology. (On the plus side, I knew the Krebs cycle cold.) Compared to my new classmates, many of whom had gone to prep schools that offered classes on topics like post-structuralism and Jungian theory, I felt like an imposter. Just learning the lingo required an enormous outlay of mental energy. I became hyperaware of my accent, and although the odd girl seemed to find my colloquialisms cute, I nevertheless always felt self-conscious opening my mouth in section. No longer the smartest boy in the class, I was forced to revamp my self-image: hick-turned-autodidact.

Now I realize that a lot of this had to do with my own insecurities. It also had to do with the friends I chose, who like me were would-be intellectuals. There were plenty of non-snobs at Harvard. It’s just that I shied away from them, and in doing so I made my lot considerably tougher than it needed to be.

Still, I loved it. For the first time I felt at home, surrounded by young people for whom a huge future was not only imaginable but expected. True story: my roommate spent an entire semester building a tiny, working MRI machine, which he then used to scan our hamster. I loved it. I loved the fact that the campus was older than the country in which it was located. I loved the traditions, loved the corny stories they trotted out on the campus tour. I collected Harvard: haunting its museums, investigating its architecture. I made pilgrimages to as many of its seventysomething libraries as I could. (The holdings in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Tuscany would have to wait. I did, however, get to the New England Primate Research Center, an odyssey involving a borrowed station wagon and a missed exit on the pike.) I attended every formal, took every famous course by every famous professor, went to every Master’s Tea. I soaked it all up, and when I spoke to my old high-school friends, pretended to sympathize with their minor-league yearnings, I knew at last that I was free.

 

 

MOST PEOPLE, should they ever chance to spare a thought for philosophers, picture a bunch of white-haired men in smoking jackets, or perhaps togas, pulling on pipes and expounding the meaning of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. In all the best departments in this country—places like Harvard, Princeton, or NYU—philosophy bears much more similarity to mathematics. This style, which predominates at English-speaking universities, is called Anglo-American or analytic philosophy, and it places heavy emphasis on formal logic and argumentative clarity. Once you’ve read papers with as many symbols as words, it comes as no surprise that most of the great analytic philosophers have had backgrounds in math or hard science: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Tarski, Quine, Carnap, Putnam.

Nowhere in that list are Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault. There’s a reason for that: at Harvard, we don’t read them. Other departments do—comparative literature, women’s studies. But citing one of those names during a philosophy class is the fastest way to get yourself laughed out of the room. They belong to contemporary philosophy’s other major school, the Continentals, less a coherent group than a wild and woolly bunch of thinkers who refuse to play by the rules.

For many Continentals, the mechanics of an argument are secondary to its outcome. These writers tend to describe the world as they, as individuals, see it, and as a result they often (appear to?) eschew logic in favor of rhetoric, asserting as self-evident all sorts of ideas that an analytic philosopher would question. When, for example, Sartre posits that the essence of our humanity is freedom, he takes for granted that freedom exists. Not so fast, says the analytic philosopher. We’re free? Prove it. Only then can we talk about whether freedom is important. To which Sartre replies: I don’t have time for your petty
bullmerde.

The animus on each side is considerable. I remember my sophomore tutorial leader outlining for us the rules of his favorite game: “First I name a philosopher. Then you name a worse philosopher. We each take turns, naming worse and worse philosophers, until someone says Jacques Derrida. That person loses.”

I am sure that equally snide games take place in universities all across France.

In sum, Continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees, and analytic philosophers think that Continental philosophers are unintelligible, egomaniacal morons.

Father Fred and I had read a lot of Kierkegaard and early Christian theology, as well as some existentialist fiction, works by Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevsky—which is to say, I’d mostly studied the morons, and was thus underprepared for what I faced at Harvard, so grossly that I briefly considered abandoning the concentration for something more user-friendly, English or government. But I persevered, spurred on by the notion that I couldn’t, and just as I taught myself not to drop my
r’s
or elongate my vowels, with practice I learned the system, coming to appreciate the crystalline beauty of the analytic style and winning several departmental prizes for my writing.

I had a dirty little secret, though: all the while I’d been nursing a nasty addiction to existentialism. I couldn’t get away from it, especially Nietzsche, whose ideas gripped me in a way I could not easily explain. People will always argue about what he really meant, but what stood out for me was his insistence that we are radically alone—and therefore bear ultimate responsibility for creating ourselves. His concept of the
Übermensch,
so often vilified as amoral, made perfect sense to me. I had done precisely that: I had overcome, rising up out of an unread cesspool, breaking myself down, reforming myself in a mold of my own making. As senior year rolled around, and I found my professors encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D., I could not help but believe that Fate had big plans for me. Or, more accurately, that I had big plans for Fate.

Thus it was that I enrolled in graduate school intending to write my dissertation on the one topic that meant most to me: free will. And damned if I wouldn’t nail that puppy to the floor, melding existentialist fervor with analytical precision, forging a new mode of expression that would not only reshape a three-thousand-year-old debate but clear a new path for philosophy going into the twenty-first century. Applause, please.

Such grandiosity was misplaced. To begin with, I’m not smart enough, although it has taken me years to come to grips with that. (If I even have.) More important, I was out of sync with the times. The bitter facts of contemporary American academia are thus: one writes not to change the shape of the world but to get one’s degree; one gets a degree in order to get a job; one gets a job because one must live. If one is very talented and very lucky, one catches the attention of Oxford University Press; one sells three hundred copies, all to other philosophers, and toasts oneself with a bottle of mediocre merlot.