Excerpt:
The Figure of Icaraus

Prologue
School: An Illusion

For years I have been the headmaster of a school for boys. If you enter the building on any given morning you will see a whirl of purposeful activity as hundreds of high school boys stream into Morning Assembly to the hurrying cadence of amplified music, a rousing trumpet voluntary. The boys wear blue blazers, school ties, and khaki pants. Some of them look tousled and disheveled as they approach the auditorium. As they near the entrances, which are attended by faculty members, the boys may adjust the knots of their ties so that they rest properly in the vee of their shirt collars. Crisp but friendly greetings are exchanged as the boys enter.

Inside, the music is muted until the hall is quiet. The boys attend to the morning’s business: announcements of many activities and meetings, the reporting of the teams’ scores from the previous day. Then perhaps one of the seniors might deliver his required Senior Speech or a guest speaker might address a topical issue. Occasionally I speak to the assembled school about a disciplinary matter or some other school concern.

After assembly the boys file out, stop at their lockers. Some shed their ties and jackets; others keep them on. They make their way up the great central staircase to classes, laboratories, the library. Those without a first period class head off to the student commons where they finish homework, review for tests, chat with friends. Some go instead to the new fitness center where they remove their shoes and lift weights.

The classes themselves are outwardly casual, but quickly get down to business. With few extraneous gestures and little resistance, the boys are soon translating Latin lines, answering questions in Spanish or French, solving equations at the chalkboard, negotiating their way through computer software which enables them to design buildings or to animate images. In studios pots are thrown. In the dark room images are coaxed into definition. Walking the bright corridor of the humanities wing, you would hear loud faculty voices stressing the conventions of the sonnet, the progression of ancient battles, the distinction between skepticism and non-belief.

At mid-morning the boys break for snacks—donuts, bagels—or to attend the dozens of organizational meetings announced earlier. At lunchtime they dine in clusters of six or seven—“family style”—with an attending faculty member. Afternoon classes are followed for most boys by team practices and outdoor activities like cycling, casual tennis, kayaking, or trail blazing in the woodlands surrounding the school. In the evening some of them return for drama and choral rehearsals, review courses for standardized tests, or to work on school publications: the literary magazine, newspaper, yearbook. Before they retire for the night, the boys will find a way to dispatch two or three hours of homework. It is, for all of us, a long, full day.

It is difficult, after so many years, for me to summarize a typical school day without an almost wearying awareness of its orderliness. There is so much forward motion as we move from bell to bell, class to class, meeting to meeting, event to event. The familiarity and continuity of such days tend to dull our awareness of what, if we were not bound together in school, might occur to us as bracing and discontinuous. We only faintly sense, for example, the changing of seasons, mark them less by their distinctive natural manifestations than by the routines we impose upon them: a new season of sport, another grading period. Nor, really, do we take much note of an even more immediate drama: that the boys in our charge are changing and growing. They are, yearly, outgrowing school, but this is never acknowledged, and even the boys themselves fail to take notice. Their change and growth are presumed in the orderly succession of freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior status. When the seniors matriculate on to their various universities in June, they do not seem at all lost to us, for in the fall we will have seniors once more.

Not that we do not regard our graduates fondly. We feel we have taught and tamed them, exercised and enjoyed them. They carry with them, we believe, the mark of their time with us. We understand they will progress through the expected next stage in their personal unfolding. They will proceed through their higher education, then they will enter the professions, take their adult positions in commerce. We will keep track of them. Those who return to the city to live and work will very likely send us their sons.

There is something undeniably reassuring about the continuity in the careers of the boys who pass through my school. It is the way, we come to accept, it is supposed to be. It is the way the world works.

Of course we do not mean this literally. Most of the peoples on the planet know no such scholastic or vocational or civic continuity. We mean, rather, that this is the way our world works, admittedly (even smugly) a small world, but a world that works on, as surly as bell follows bell, as juniors follow seniors.

And if we step back to gain a much broader, more comprehensive view, don’t we see a world, in this case a nation, that works? At the level of village or national polity, laws are made and enforced. Magistrates succeed magistrates in a peaceful, orderly way. Successive generations assume necessary roles in the economic and domestic orders. Yes, there is chafing in the interstices. There is ferment. There is creativity. There is progress. But above all, there is an unmistakable order, as orderly, in a moment of reflection, as a school day or year.

Last spring as I was conferring prizes on the school’s annual Prize Day, it occurred to me with considerable pleasure that I had taught the fathers of most of the boys receiving awards. The sons were quite similar to their fathers, but by no means identical. One would be more happy-go-lucky than his grim, rather driven father. Another would be more fastidious, another funnier, another dreamier than his father. But they were unmistakably, to the cowlick and to the chin, their father’s sons. At that moment, conferring those prizes, I experienced a profound sense of continuity at work in the world. For that moment it occurred to me that all change, creativity, and novelty were held fast in a gentle dynamic of a greater order. I had watched as those boys’ fathers had grown up and out of school and then taken their places in the order of the city. I knew the sons were on their purposeful way.

Or so it seemed. And so it always seems to me whenever I peer out the window of an airplane cabin at night and see below me the vast, twinkling grid work of the city where I live. The pleasing geometries are saved from predictability by quirks and irregularities of topography, but there seems to be no question that a design is at work. Jewel-lit at night, the design is lovely and benign, lovely and benign certainly in excess of the conscious plans of any earth-bound designer. The thought is deeply comforting, although my comfort is irrational; I know this city. Enclosed in that glittering grid are housing projects of heartbreaking ugliness. That dazzling spray of gems is only a mall. Those streets, when I come to land, are mean streets.

School: A Reality

Keeping school requires a kind of compulsory amnesia. What veteran schoolmaster doesn’t know in his heart the hopeless elusiveness of continuity and order. There is always just below the hum and crackle of a school day the unnerving suspicion that anything—the worst—could happen. Sometimes it does. A carload of boys full of beer and full of the devil can speed off into the night and never return home. At the precise moment of the collision, they are in a kind of dream state, not fully in the world. Some boys burn to make trouble that no school can contain. Some boys fall into a thrall of hopelessness and sadness they cannot begin to name. Psychiatrists find a name. Medicines are prescribed. But for those boys a black hopelessness threatens to open up before them like an endless beckoning pit. Some boys catch an intimation of paradise or sensual ecstasy and cannot thereafter see the point of slogging through deadening routines, spending themselves in competition, dressing to occasion, or even simply bending to a standard. Some boys sense the emptiness and capriciousness of standards and decide to test them all, as they might thrust a fist through a cardboard wall. Such boys will assume the manners of a subjugated race. They will grow or remove their hair in an outlandish way. They will stain and pierce their flesh. They will provoke. They will hold maddeningly back. They will take up arms and the uniform of the enemy. Many other boys will not do these things, but will locate their own dream state in which they will savor stories of flight and rebellion and listen to thudding, pounding anthems of mayhem through their headsets.

The simple, problematic fact is that no boy passes cheerfully and readily into the civil order of the adult world. Some may seem to—and aren’t their parents and teachers proud and relieved—but, as we shall see, such boys are only masquerading, held temporarily in a dream of Conventional Success. They may take their part in this imposture because their personal circumstances have manipulated or intimidated them from realizing themselves and finding their own way. Highly rationalized and effective families, schools, and communities occasionally succeed in obliterating from youth’s view any imaginable path of divergence or individuation. Such youths, though in fact severely arrested in their personal unfolding, have all the outer markings of gratifying achievers. They are for a time the prizewinners, celebrated golden boys. But there is about them, always, a detectable quality of unreality. The very best of them seem vaguely inauthentic, a little too good to be true. Moreover, this hint of inauthenticity becomes more heavily pronounced as the imposture is carried on into adulthood. Despite perhaps impressive passages into good positions and the acquisition of “trophy” spouses and early domestic comforts, the weight of having unconsciously taken up a persona which is no more than a civic dream begins to take its toll. The imposture can only be maintained by the will, with deadening effort. Thus the golden boy becomes brittle, perhaps chronically ill, his social gestures predictable and uninteresting. Such men might be enviably reliable and on that account valuable to their communities, but they are far from happy. The fortunate among them begin to acknowledge their unhappiness. They are good, but good in a way that distances themselves puzzlingly from others. There may be plenty of purposeful activity and social occasion, but there is little connection or release. There is no deep pleasure. Such men meet their commitments, but they cannot find intimacy. As a character in a Flannery O’Connor short story puts it, such men are good, but not right. As such they are headed for one of two kinds of trouble.

The first kind of trouble is eerily familiar; it is the kind we read about in the papers. The pillar of the community is suddenly, spectacularly disgraced. The President dallies with a bimbo. The rabbi has been accessing the most repellant pornography on his office computer. The lionized coach of perennial state championship teams is caught in a sexual relationship with a player. The youth minister is a pedophile. The chief accountant takes to playing the horses, then cooking the books. Such troubles are always news, and though they strike a deeply resonant note in us, we talk about them as if they are a great surprise. Even more strangely, we can’t get enough of such news. But, as we shall see, this kind of trouble is not the worst. As it happens, those inner agents of life-changing Eros or mayhem can be life saving. Very often they and the transgressions they inspire serve, in a courageous soul, as the announcement that the imposture is over, its weight too great. Disgrace is, apart from its attendant losses and embarrassments and punishments, an invitation to be born again and to live.

It is, spiritually speaking, far worse trouble to carry on the imposture unto death. To do so unconsciously leads to increasing personal alienation, bitterness, and loneliness. The man who has never grown conscious of his imposture and its costs feels, in his allegiance to lofty standards, betrayed by his era and all others. He tries to love and feel loved by those who admire him, but he can’t—because it is his noble imposture, not himself, that is admired. That imposture is a psychic construct, not a self or a soul. The construct was formed in late childhood in order to defend the conscious self from the fear of uncertainty and loss of approval. An even more profound despair is visited on the man who becomes consciously aware that his defining qualities are not really his, but a compensation for his youthful fears and boyhood failure to set forth on the uncertain journey of his individuation. This realization—and the judgment that it is too late to attempt the original journey—is perhaps the ultimate despair. Yet men in this condition can be seen everywhere. They are miserably out of sympathy with the age. They know no intimacy or love. They experience no ecstatic release, either in their minds or bodies. Their spouses perhaps accommodate them. Their spirited children turn away from them. Others keep a distance. The conscious awareness of one’s own deep, lifelong imposture is hell itself.