Like many people, I am obsessed with self-improvement. The fact that I can then turn around and examine my obsession with the eye of a cultural critic—that I can lob epithets at it, such as “capitalist” and “Calvinist” and “productivity culture”—doesn’t reduce the obsession one bit. No sooner do I see a form of human excellence in action than I start to wonder how I could acquire it for my own skill-hoard. This sounds normal enough, maybe, and even laudable, except that many forms of human excellence are incompatible, and human beings are supposed to make choices rather than trying to have everything.
I admire, for example, the community pastor at my church, who schleps without ceasing. I love people who schlep. (I schlep as little as possible, and always with a barely suppressed air of martyrdom.) She fills the holes created by other people’s slipups and incompetencies—organizing meal trains, leading children’s worship, administering the Eucharist—and never seems to break a sweat, and yet she also doesn’t have that annoying impersonal quality that omni-competent people often manifest. You can actually have a conversation with her in which she is genuine, present, and vulnerable. How admirable! I would love to be more like that. I could help so many people I care about.
I would also like to be more like David Lynch, who was my favorite living film director until (cursed day) he died. He was a monk for his art, living in a self-hypnotizing set of routines that allowed him to see the monstrousness and beauty of human life with a child’s clarity and to then share that vision with a precision and accuracy and care that only adult discipline can manage. He was so personally genial that even his ex-wives still speak well of him. If I were more like David Lynch, the quarter-finished novel in my Google Drive might be finished, and it might even be good. It might change lives or make them seem more vivid and worth living, as Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and even Eraserhead have done for me.
