James concluded that there is something in us that seems to require difficulty and the overcoming of difficulty, the presence of both light and darkness, danger and deliverance. “But what our human emotions seem to require,” he wrote, “is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another [challenge] more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us.”
At their highest, James argued, human beings are ideal-forming animals. And their lives go best when they are lived in service to an ideal. As he climactically put it, “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”
The last thing a mentor does, of course, is send you out into the world and, in some sense, cut you off. My mentor early in my career was William F. Buckley, Jr. I worked for him at his magazine for eighteen months, and during this period he taught me what excellence looked like. Then he sent me off, and I never really was close to him again. Some people who held the same job I did and went through this process were hurt by it. I missed him in the years that followed, but I still think Buckley did the right thing. At some point you have to let adult protégés, and children, go.
Eventually everybody gets cut adrift; you are faced with the big decisions on your own. Maybe you had the clearest annunciation moment. Maybe you had the best mentor. But there will still be big, baffling decisions you have to make. Do I take this job or that job? Do I use my talents this way or that way? Do I move to this city or that city?
How do you make the big, transformational decisions of life? It is to that problem we now turn.
TWELVE
Vampire Problems
Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength, and a life of glamorous intensity. You’d have all sorts of new skills. You could fly around at night. You wouldn’t even have to drink human blood; you could get some donated cow’s blood. Friends who have undergone the experience say it is incredible. They claim that as vampires they experience the world in new ways they couldn’t have even have imagined back when they were human.
Would you do it? Would you consent to receive that life-altering bite, knowing that once changed you could never go back?
The difficulty of the choice is that you have to use your human self to try to guess if you would enjoy being a vampire self. Becoming a vampire is what the philosopher L. A. Paul calls a “transformative choice.” This is the sort of choice that changes who you are.
Life is filled with vampire problems. Marriage turns you into a different person. Having kids changes who you are and what you want. So does emigrating to a new country, converting to a different religion, going to med school, joining the Marines, changing careers, and deciding on where to live. Every time you make a commitment to something big, you are making a transformational choice.
All decisions involve a large measure of uncertainty about the future. What makes transformational choices especially tough is that you don’t know what your transformed self will be like or will want, after the vagaries of life begin to have their effects. Things that seem sweet now may seem disgusting to the new you. New sorts of misery and joy, none of which you’ve experienced so far, may be the meat and potatoes of your future existence. It’s really hard to know your current self, but it’s pretty well impossible to know what your future transformed self will be like. You can’t rationally think through this problem, because you have no data about the desires of the transformed you.
Furthermore, you’re aware that this is the kind of choice that will cast a lingering shadow. Every choice is a renunciation, or an infinity of renunciations. You will be forever after aware of the road not taken, what might have been if you’d gone another way. You could