Years ago I was watching a movie on TV. Actually, my daughter was watching it, and I just happened to be in the same room reading a book. It was one of those teen-age, after-school specials - not the beach party/sex and violence teen-age movies, but the terribly, terribly sensitive sort. I have no idea of the plot or theme of the movie, but one thing did, for some rea-son, attract my notice. The boy who was the main character, was, I believe, a cellist. He practiced regularly and passionately, and his father felt that some of his time could be better spent - like in playing football. The thing he said to his son that got my attention was, "Not everyone can be great, you know;" to which his son replied, "No, but I want to be." I involuntar-ily said, "Don't we all!" interfering with Edith's concentration and irritating her profoundly.
I don't usually respond verbally to the television set, particularly when the show is not really good enough to interest me nor bad enough to disgust me, and this was neither. I was surprised by my own emotional reaction to that particular passage, the next thing popping into my head, that quote by Thoreau, which at the time I erroneously attributed to Emerson (you can't imagine how difficult that makes it to find the reference): "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
When we are growing up, trying one idea after another of what we would like to do as a career, we seldom actually think of what we may have to do for a living. We want to be police or firefighters, occupations that seem somehow romantic. We might want to act in the movies or maybe be teachers. Those are jobs which satisfy our notions of fame or power or adventure, or even affection. Seldom does anyone say he or she'd like to be a factory worker or a dishwasher, or even be in middle management, but that's where many people end up.
The thing is that we grow up and discover that sometimes making a living is more necessary than carving out a career, that circumstances may be much more powerful than ambition. People fall into, are pushed into, just find themselves, in places they had never intended or wished to be. They get a job, just a job, then maybe they get married, have children, or perhaps find that they need to help out aging parents, or for whatever reason they find themselves condemned (is it necessarily, as Thoreau thinks, condemned?) to their 9 to 5 job, though it's more likely to be 8 to 4:30 and lunchtime doesn't count.
Once I did a memorial service for a man who spent his life in deep dissatisfaction with his various jobs in middle management in the defense industry. He didn't like the jobs or the industry, yet he couldn't seem to get out of it. He had three children to support. His life truly was one of quiet desperation. He had dreams of adventure, of money, of fame, of leisure, but his life became one of just getting up and going to work that he hated every morning. At last he found his only way out. He became chronically ill and was unable to work at all. How many factory workers, office workers, restaurant workers, are just workers - with no dreams or needs or ambitions beyond their jobs? "I with the soul of a Dante/am mate and companion of fleas." These are the mass of humanity of whom Thoreau speaks with contempt as well as compassion.
These are the people who never even manage to try to fulfill a dream of a career of greatness, but many do try. I think this boy in the movie is one who would never get trapped in something else that would keep him from trying to fulfill his dream. He is too sure of his own direction. But what if, even if he tries and keeps trying, he never makes it? Greatness is something that belongs to very few. The boy's father was right: Not everyone can be great. Very few can be truly great, at least in the sense that it was meant in that dialogue. Sometimes the ability just isn't there. Olympic athletes must work full time to get good enough for the Olympics, but there are many people who could work full time and never get good enough. I suspect that with music, with any true career, the same thing would apply. It might be that one could practice the cello for eight hours a day, and yet never achieve greatness, not have that special spark, that extra talent which makes the difference between competence and greatness. The boy wants to be great. He will work hard to achieve greatness, but it may be that hard work is not enough. Edison said that ge-nius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but one can perspire eternally and without that 10% one will never achieve genius.
Perhaps, though, the ability and the drive are both there. Say that this young man does become a great cellist. I wonder if greatness exists without recognition. I wonder if his life would escape the quiet desperation of those who either do not have goals or cannot achieve the ones they have if he spent his life - the best cellist in the world - in an obscure orchestra in the Middle West. Is that greatness - or what he means by greatness? If a person is the best of whatever he or she wishes to be the best of, and has no influence on others, is it still greatness? Would Pablo Casals be great if no one ever heard him play?
The mass of humankind live lives of quiet desperation. I wondered if that were really true, and I think that to some degree it is, at least some of the time. It may be true when people are locked into a life situation which seems dead end and pointless. It may be true when recognition, either in fame, money or respect is withheld. There are a lot of ways not to be happy.
One of the things that I argue, probably without convincing anyone who was not already convinced of it, is that there is a spiritual dimension to life - an aspect of it which is not material day-to-dayness - the choice, in effect, between God and mammon. I think that the counterforce to the life of quiet desperation is connectedness to the infinite, to that spiritual dimension.
That, of course, is extraordinarily vague and completely useless advice, to suggest that to avoid unhappiness or despair you have to get in touch with the spiritual dimension of existence, so I'll try to be a little more concrete. Thoreau felt that the thing to do was to throw down your material responsibilities entirely; that it was the plodding nature of the everyday life of getting and spending which kept people from the relationship with the divine which is happiness. A transcendentalist, he saw God in nature, and his answer to the everyday was to leave and live alone at Walden Pond, observing the life there, the changes of the seasons, getting his own food as he could find it (though periodically, I understand, taking his laundry home to his mother to wash for him) and thus getting in real touch with the infinite as he perceived it. He did not, however, stay there, nor would he have been content without sharing his insights with others in his book Walden.
I suspect that Thoreau's answer would be as useless to the majority of humankind as it was to himself. The way to be connected to your spiritual aspect (or that of the universe) is not to drop out of society and life and the ways in which it stifles us, but to fulfill your potential as completely as possible, to be the best, most productive, most creative person that you, yourself, can be - to pursue not happiness but greatness.
Sometimes that does mean pulling yourself out of the life you are presently living. Instead of plodding from day to day, to recall what it was that you really wanted to do with your life, and go ahead and do it. I believe that you owe yourself at least as much as you do anyone else, and that you have as much a duty as a right to follow your own star. However, I am not advocating the monstrous selfishness that often goes along with that philosophy. I suspect that there are some people whose creative potential is such that they must follow their particular path or be somehow destroyed spiritually, but there is perhaps elsewhere the greatest of all creative potentials: the power of love. Sometimes the reason that people have for remaining in what seem like dead ends in their jobs and lives is that they have major responsibilities that love requires of them. Thus they too are following their star, the star of love, and they do not have to be con-cerned about their connection with the infinite or the fulfillment of their potential. They have achieved greatness.
I think the hardest sort of desperation to deal with is the one whose source is the realization that sometimes our own inadequacies and flaws keep us from our ideal of achievement. How can anyone do other than despair, knowing that one simply isn't good enough? Can we accept being second-rate? Even third-rate? Often we rationalize it by saying that we could have done it if we had just tried harder or practiced longer, thus adding the burden of guilt to our disappointment. Sometimes we deny our own failings and blame our lack of greatness on unfairness or bad luck, which doesn't relieve the desperation we feel, even if it is true. What does relieve it is to know that we have reached for the highest even though our reach exceeded our grasp. It is the process of seeking perfection - greatness - which makes us more than the plodders of Thoreau's contempt.
Then there is the bitterness that comes to those who, having achieved their ideal of greatness, go unrecognized. The artist who dies of a broken heart because of a lack of appreciation is an old romantic story. Whether it could actually kill someone, I don't know, but it has embittered many lives. It is extremely painful to know that you have done well, well enough to deserve praise, and yet receive little or no appreciation from others. Yet that despair, too, is the choice of mammon over God. It is not the praise of others, nor even the influence over them which makes greatness. It is the accomplishment itself, the contribution, however unrecognized, to the life of the spirit.
It is also possible to fulfill your creative potential in other ways than your career or the accep-tance of personal responsibilities. It is true that if you have a career that is utterly fulfilling, that is wonderful, but it is not the only way to be fulfilled. My father was an unusual man, a genius, both in the sense that the psychologists mean when they test IQ's and also in the popular sense of someone with an extraordinarily innovative and creative mind. The last job that he had was as a scissors finisher. The scissors that left his hands were as nearly perfect as scissors can be, but it was a mindless, repetitive kind of job. He was asked how he could stand it, and his answer was that he rather liked it, as it left his mind free to think whatever he felt like thinking about. When he got home he did what he was interested in. His life, though seen as a failure by most had never been one of quiet desperation. He had always been in touch with the creative possibilities - with the spiritual.
One of my happiest childhood memories is the day my father brought home a prism to show and explain to us children. He was scientifically educated, and this prism was certainly not the first that he had ever seen, but the pleasure he got out of sending its lovely colors dancing about the room and the joy of explaining the mystery of the refraction of light was as new as the morning. The lessons he taught me that day were far greater than he knew. He taught me that everyday things can be bathed in beauty and that the continuing wonder and joy in the transcendent things of this world are a path to greatness that all of us can follow.
I started out with my response that we all wanted to be great, but as I hinted earlier, I don't think that's entirely true. There are some who accept their parent's dictum that it really doesn't matter, so long as you're happy. They know that the bluebird of happiness can be found in their own back yard, so they go out back looking for it, and they may not find it. We need more than the search for happiness. We need to pursue greatness - the greatness which consists of the spiritual, of the choice of the holy rather than mammon however it is defined. It doesn't have to be far away, or different in more than that one essential way from day to day living. But that way is what makes all the difference.
Just about the only time Unitarian Universalists use the word sin is when they're talking about dessert. "That double chocolate mousse looks positively sinful!" The real sin is not appreciating it, and the perfection of its being. You don't have to eat it, of course, if you're on a diet, but you still ought to give it the respect that Alice Walker gave in The Color Purple to purple flowers in a field, saying that God gets angry when they aren't appreciated. Sin is the disconnection from the spiritual dimension which can be found on every level, in every place, if you choose it. Even if your life seems very pedestrian, to choose that connection with the infinite, with the creative, by fulfilling your potential of talent or love or appreciation or commitment, is to refuse desperation and to choose greatness.