The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (18 page)

Ethan
couldn’t
explain it to me. I saw later that he couldn’t even explain it to himself. He was articulate about absolutely everything else. Why not about this? This need to become a doctor seemed to emerge from some other part of his personality. Perhaps it was related to what happened to him on the playing fields? That competitive part of his spirit—that wildness that I never really understood?

That fall, Ethan and I went on a four-day hiking trip to Vermont. We stayed for a night at his family’s farm. Ethan was more remote on this trip than he had been before. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. Had something happened while I was away? He denied that it had. We sat up late into the night staring into the fire.

In the middle of the night, Ethan woke me up. He was sitting on the side of my bed, sobbing. He tried to talk, but couldn’t. “I just can’t, can’t …,” he would begin, and then the sobbing would erupt from deep in his gut. Finally it ebbed.

We sat by the window and talked for most of the rest of the night. We took a walk around the farm as the sun was coming up over the yellowing Vermont woods. He felt split, he said. Split right down the middle.
He talked of his love of English, his desire to write poetry, to write prose. To live the life of a writer.

“But it’s an impoverished life, Steve. My family, my parents, my sister. I can’t let them down. I have to take care of them and I can’t take care of them properly if I go down this ruinous course. I cannot do this to them.”

Ethan had worked it all out in his mind while I was away. He would become a doctor. He would make plenty of money, and lift his family out of the relative poverty in which they lived. He could help his little sister go to college.

The full story began to spill out: While I was away, Ethan discovered that his father had mortgaged the farm in order to send him to college. As a result of the bumpy economy, the farm was now in serious financial peril—the same farm that had been in the family for four generations. That piece of land was all that was standing between Ethan’s family and desolation. They could lose it—because of him.

Ethan and I didn’t have the word dharma then. But we did have the word “duty.” Close enough. As Ethan saw it, he had a duty. I understood this. It felt like a noble act, and seemed to involve a kind of self-sacrifice I could not even imagine making. We rationalized this together: Medicine would give him an outlet for his brilliant mind, his competitive spirit. And he could write on the weekends, or in the early mornings.

7

By his late twenties, Frost was perfectly aware of his genius, of his lifework, and of the task ahead of him. But he also knew that the systematic cultivation of poetic genius is a high-wire act of human endeavor. He had already announced to his grandfather—who was pushing him to relinquish poetry as a career—that it would take him twenty years to come into his full power as a poet. Frost understood that the poet’s chief job is to
create the right conditions for the blossoming of The Gift
. He understood that he needed a chrysalis—a quiet, contemplative life—with plenty of leisure for writing, reading, thinking, contemplating. He intuited that he needed a life set close to nature—nature, which had always been his muse. Frost was intuitively aware of an important principle: In
the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.

Frost next made one of the most pivotal decisions of his life: He decided to become a farmer. He bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. To his family and friends this seemed a surprising move. But it turned out to be a brilliant one.

Jay Parini, one of Frost’s most important biographers, describes the farm that would be Frost’s poetic chrysalis: “
From all sides of the house the view was appealing. Beyond a rolling hayfield to the east, one saw a large woodlot, composed mostly of maple, oak, and beech. On the south side a stand of alders concealed a west-running brook fed by a pasture spring. A cranberry bog lay nearby. Patches of raspberries and blackberries grew beside the barn, where a sizable vegetable garden could also be found, its contents ready for harvest. There was plenty of space where one might build chicken coops on the north side, beyond the barn.”

This would be Frost’s laboratory. He would spend the next decade quietly raising poultry in Derry, surrounding himself with the sources of his inspiration by day, and writing poetry in the kitchen every night while the rest of the family slept. “
This was a time,” said Frost later, “when my eyes and ears were open, very open.”

Those who did not understand the genius of Frost’s choice to raise poultry found him an inept farmer. Much has been made, too, by Frost biographers of his reputed “laziness.” This shows a stunning lack of understanding of Frost’s choice. As Robert Penn Warren has observed, “
It was a necessary laziness. It was the way his mind, his imagination, worked; he needed all that time, the spaciousness, the ease of getting from day to day. Poems could root in those spaces. In his case, they did.”

Frost’s gift burst quietly forth during his eleven years in Derry. It was the most sustained period of creativity and generativity in his long life. From the farm he would take many treasures: a close connection with the earth, with the touch and feel and smell of nature, and with the conversation of the plainspoken men and women who surrounded him in an agricultural life. He would draw on this material for the rest of his career.

“
It all started in Derry,” Frost said. “The whole thing.” He had—at
some considerable risk—created precisely the right conditions for his dharma. He had taken a risk: He had trusted The Gift.

8

Two years after we graduated from Amherst, I visited Ethan in Boston. He was at the end of his second year of medical school—living in a little apartment near the campus, with his new wife, Betts. I had not met Betts until the wedding—a grand affair that took place at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. She was blonde, well-spoken, elegant in every way. And with a toughness that matched Ethan’s. I liked her instantly. I thought it was probably a good match in many ways, because she could stand up to Ethan’s wildness. But I soon discovered that she didn’t like me. She was anxious that Ethan’s literary friend would pull him away from his determination to become a great doctor.

Ethan and I had a wonderful visit, though. He talked excitedly about medicine, and he and I looked together into the future as we had so often at Amherst. I could see him making the best of his situation. But we were both nostalgic for college times. He now talked about his love of poetry as naïve, and though he appreciated that aspect of himself, he thought it was best left behind in favor of “really growing up.” I swallowed hard at this. Really?

Over the next decade, I watched as Ethan’s medical career unfolded brilliantly. Within five years or so had already begun to make a name for himself in New York, where he had settled after his residency.

Medicine was for Ethan rather akin to the playing fields of college. I could see the competitive, aggressive streak in him coming forward. When I visited Betts and him in their new duplex in Manhattan, I could see a burgeoning concern for money and status. She talked excitedly about her seven-series BMW, their membership in a posh club. She was a shameless name-dropper. I looked at Ethan. Not a trace of embarrassment.

Meanwhile, I had begun to establish myself in Boston. I went to graduate school. I found a partner and I settled down. We bought a house. Ethan and I slowly drifted apart—into very different worlds. I
observed to myself from time to time: It is interesting to see the effects of choices as they play themselves out over the long trajectory of life.

9

Frost’s decision to buy the farm in Derry was one of a series of decisions that moved him closer to a full commitment to poetry. The farm was a deeper step in, and he would draw on its inspiration for the rest of his life. But there were more steps to come.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you
. Frost knew that his calling was going to require more of him. He had not yet fully committed his life to poetry. He was still farming. But too, during the Derry years he had become seriously involved in teaching. He had, at Derry, a busy, complex, and full life.