Composing a Further Life

studying Arabic poetry and Islam, had announced his approaching retirement. When I completed my degree, in 1963, I was invited to stay on at Harvard as an instructor in Arabic (an appointment that continued until 1966, when my husband took a job in the Philippines, which effectively ended my career as a linguist specializing in the Middle East). The following fall, at the age of twenty-three, I put my hair up in a bun, bought a couple of stodgy tweed suits to make myself look older, and began teaching, overcoming my hesitations from time to time with the advice that the best way to really learn any subject is to teach it.
    Most Americans of my generation will make the immediate association between the fall of 1963 and the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22. As I ascended the steps of Sever Hall on that Friday morning to teach my class, one of my students ran up and told me that the president had been shot in Dallas and was in the hospital, barely alive. Within minutes after I entered the classroom, we heard the bells of the campus chapel begin to toll and knew that he had died. I dismissed the class and wandered off the campus in a state of shock, ending up in a Catholic church nearby, alone in near darkness.
    At that time the voting age was twenty-one, so I had voted for the first time in 1960, in the Kennedy-Nixon election. I had supported Kennedy but not with great passion, and I had not been much caught up in the romance of Camelot. I found myself puzzled in the days that followed the assassination by the degree of personal grief I encountered—often in people who had been critical of the president only the week before. I had a different reaction—an overwhelming sense of the way in which this event would affect the security and optimism of people all around the world. I saw it as triggering a deep global insecurity, calling into question the peace and order necessary for their lives and the lives of their children.
    For reasons that are still not clear to me, that loss was personified for me in an imagined peasant farmer in India, working with a simple plow on an arid hillside, struggling to feed his family, a man who would know of America and the American president through the occasional transistor radio in the village but who understood intuitively that violence breeds violence and that the assassination of a powerful leader on the other side of the planet could darken the course of history. As I sat in that empty church, my imagination of a faraway farmer, who could have been on any continent, came for me to stand for a global erosion of hope.
    That day I made a sort of promise that I would work to make some small increment of hope in the world. I had no idea what that might mean in practical terms, but I was fairly sure it would take me away from Arabic grammar and the fascinating puzzles of linguistics. Abandon my newly minted degree and study theology? People I trusted urged that that was a bad idea. So instead I decided that I would at least reshape my teaching and research in ways that allowed me to engage more closely with the lives of others. As a new Ph.D., I was confronting issues of identity and vocation that I had drifted past while following my interests in college and graduate school.
    Over the following months, as I struggled to understand the basic shift of commitment that had taken place for me, one of the first steps I took was to go to Erikson and volunteer to be a teaching assistant in his course on the human life cycle, as several other faculty members had done before me, in order to immerse themselves in his profoundly humane thinking. Three years later, I began teaching anthropology in the Philippines. My focus had shifted from language to lives as they are lived in different societies.
    The connection of hope to Erikson was obvious, for the first and most basic of the strengths (virtues) he described is hope, developed when the infant struggles to resolve the conflict between basic trust and basic mistrust. The final conflict in his scheme of the life cycle is between ego integrity and despair; Erikson referred to the strength of that stage as wisdom. You might say that I turned to Erikson for a tutorial on hope, and here I am, some fifty years later, right on schedule, trying to understand wisdom.
    As with the other virtues that Erikson explored, it is important to avoid limiting concepts like hope or wisdom to any one stage of life. Erikson saw the earliest beginning