decades? What do I desire so much that it captures me at the depth of my being? In choosing a vocation, it’s precisely wrong to say that talent should trump interest. Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent. The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.
Robert Greene gets at the core truth in his book Mastery: “Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end.”
The Greeks had a concept, later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. The daemon identifies itself as an obsessive interest, a feeling of being at home at a certain sort of place, doing a certain activity—standing in front of classroom, helping a sick person out of bed, offering hospitality at a hotel.
When you see an individual at the peak of her powers, it’s because she has come into contact with her daemon, that wound, that yearning, that core irresolvable tension. This is especially obvious in writers and academics. There’s often some core issue that obsesses them and they scratch at it for their entire lives. For example, W. Thomas Boyce is an eminent scholar of child psychiatry. He’s most famous for his theory of the orchid and the dandelion. Some kids are highly reactive (orchids) and either soar to extraordinary heights or plunge to depths, depending on their contexts. Other are less reactive (dandelions); even bad circumstances don’t bring them down.
This academic interest was no accident, he writes in his book The Orchid and the Dandelion. He had a sister named Mary, who was brilliant and beautiful and charismatic. As a kid she was always doing audacious things. One naptime she managed to hilariously shove an entire small box of raisins up her nose one by one. (This resulted in a trip to the doctor’s office.) But as she got older the effects of her disrupted childhood began to be more obvious. She managed to get a college degree from Stanford and a graduate degree from Harvard, but her mental health problems grew more and more severe and finally she ended her life just before her fifty-third birthday. Boyce spent his life worrying about his sister, obsessed with that core contrast: two children, the same family, the same context. One highly and tragically reactive and the other not. It is that emotionally intense center that drives much of his work.
When you see a city in the midst of an artistic renaissance, such as Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it’s because the people in it are haunted by some fervent clash of values deep in their culture, and they struggle—usually fruitlessly—to resolve the tension. In the Florentine case, the clash between the classical moral ecology and the Christian one sparked off enormous energy. In a thousand different ways, the Florentines tried to square that unsquarable circle.
When a person or a community touches its peculiar daemon, when it confronts some unresolvable tension, the creativity can be amazing, like some kind of nuclear explosion. When a person or culture is outside its daemon, then everything becomes derivative and sentimental. A person or culture that has lost touch with its daemon has lost touch with life. Look at Florentine art just a century later.
THE BIG SHAGGY
When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed. You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy. That means you are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot penetrate. You are trying to touch something down there in the Big Shaggy, that messy thicket that sits somewhere