Told to me by a hitchhiker I picked up in Paradox, Colorado. When I asked her where she was going, she replied: “I’m not sure. Where are you going?” Her question delighted me, and she rode with me all the way to Chicago. We swapped tales all those many hours. She was full of speculations. At one point she said, in her offhand way, “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder whether tragedy is a durable literary form only because men never tire of trying to ennoble their violence and imbecility.”
Every now and again, I still get a postcard from her.
Once there was a woman who lived in the backcountry of the American West. She was skillful in many different kinds of activities. She did mechanical work with automobiles, and she could read Sanskrit, as well. She could milk a cow and do calculus. She could sail a boat, and she knew the names of all the families of flowering plants. But however efficiently and happily our friend studied, or worked at different tasks, it seemed that her ignorance increased at a faster rate than her knowledge. What was worse, she was compelled to practice unremittingly both her old and her newly learned skills, and review the whole stock of information she had acquired; all as if she were burdened with a child always growing, but never growing up.
After considering these difficulties, one bright morning this woman decided to abandon her way of life and become a specialist in truth. Such a profession is not common, and because in the time our friend lived, there was (as usual) an infinite supply of truth, but little demand, the pay was very low. But our friend countenanced these hardships because sometimes the pay was so low it made her wealthy, and because her career was successful by the most old-fashioned standards of worldly accounting; that is, it was recognized by coyotes, and accepted by her friends and by the beautiful afternoon thunderheads.
It must be said that this change in real work did not result in any apparent change in her labors. She still traveled about the country and took whatever job was at hand, and she always had many choices, because she could do so many things. But her real work was contained secretly within her apparent work, just as the branching network of human veins, if understood aright, contains the river systems of continents.
And so did she live, practicing her specialty. When, for example, she repaired a car, she would make certain to align her work with the real necessities of the car’s owners. One time she overhauled an engine so that it would break down precisely two years later, stranding in a small country town a man and woman who, having there the time and one another alone, finally gave themselves up to love. They were meant one day to find out more than just the nature of sweetness, but what is more essential—to find out where sweetness is meant to lead us.
Another time our friend went to work on a cattle ranch and in the course of building and mending fences created patterns of wire and wood so dazzling that the old ranch couple were visited by an unfathomable joy. It was as if the land they loved had written a letter to them, at last. They broke out the whiskey, invited over their friends, clicked glasses, and rollicked all night; and thereafter the whole community lived in such a way as to make their houses in later years honored among mountains.
These effects, of course, were not generally observed, and so our friend was able to live free of the fanfare of other people’s attention, and move about at her liberty. Once for a joke, while teaching science in high school, she described the equation for the chemical transformation that created jewels in the earth; then she showed how the selfsame formula could be used to describe the coming of clarity and beauty to a conversation between friends. And she developed another set of equations, for stories and poems, that allowed her students to calculate the velocity of a text in the direction of paradise. This work will become the foundation of a new science in the humanities, to be known as the vector calculus of eschatology.
From this manner of working, she concluded that to get ahead in the world, it is only necessary that the world get ahead in your understanding. Or to put it another way, to be a specialist in work, it is necessary that your work, whatever its form, make you a specialist in all the cardiac proprieties and secret generosities. To put it another way, we are all on the payroll of this planet, or to put it another way—there’s another way.