Composing a Life

definition of the search. “Loser’s history!” he said, “What would they want that for?” and I knew I could not block the appointment. To demonstrate their commitment to diversity, the department asked the man they had chosen to bone up on women.
    The certification of privilege has always been as important a function of education as bringing about learning, but there is a possibility that the real winners in a rapidly changing world will be those who are open to alternatives and able to respect and value those who are different. These winners will not require that others become losers. It is not easy for those who start from positions of privilege and are threatened by all change to accept this, but it is also not easy for those who have been outsiders and accepted negative views of their own value. Each of the friends I worked with on this project has been an immigrant learning to live in the new environment of partial equality, and so each of us has had to be open to change, just as our husbands and lovers and colleagues have been challenged to accept new forms of relationship. The change goes on, and surely the central task of education today is not to confirm what is but to equip young men and women to meet that change and to imagine what could be, recognizing the value in what they encounter and steadily working it into their lives and visions.

FIVE
PARTNERSHIPS

    M OST PEOPLE , when asked to describe their life histories, divide them into chapters that are partly conventional, representing stages of maturation, and partly idiosyncratic. Marriage, divorce, and childbearing become chapter headings in women’s lives because of the way they produce—or demand—an entire restructuring of life around commitments to others.
    When we are fortunate, of course, we have many friends, men and women, and work alongside many different kinds of people, learning and teaching in complex complementarities. But a few relationships become so central that they structure the sense of the whole. To Ellen, the major decision punctuating her life had been the decision to leave academic medicine in order to have a child. I tend to organize my own history around periods of time spent in different countries, as remembered experience with whole communities evokes its context. In the hours we spent together, it was clear that Alice was telling me the story of her life before Jack, with Jack, and after Jack.
    Jack died in April 1985. Alice had spent that Saturday at the lab, working on a technical presentation for a conference, and came home to find Jack’s body lying on the grass, where he had been cutting brush, already growing cold. Alice telephoned Barkev, Jack’s best friend, from the hospital. We joined her, standing in the emergency room, finding the sudden loss so implausible we had nothing to say. Alice cradled the stiff body on the stretcher and said again and again, “I loved him. I loved his body.”
    “You know,” Alice said later, “I didn’t cry much in that period of time, I was numb like I wasn’t there. I just wanted to die, and then I suddenly saw—you know, you have these revelations—that I was going to die eventually, no problem with that. There was nothing that was going to keep me alive forever, it was just a question of a few years, a very finite period of time. So did I really feel that I couldn’t do interesting things in that period of time? That I had to die right then on the spot? I realized that I was in an enormous amount of pain because my life had been so pleasurable, in spite of all the hard things. I used to wake up in the morning beside Jack and look over, and he was very beautiful and childlike, and I would think, how did I become so lucky?
    “We always made love in the morning, and it was always lovely, and then we would walk in the woods. He really appreciated all the birds and the geese, and he was interested in everything. It was really a very wonderful life. Because all at once I had what I had always wanted, which was working on the same thing. It meant my head wouldn’t be so cluttered with having a work life and then a home life. I have a kind of a simpleminded head that likes everything to be in one direction, all in some sort of a ball.”
    The story of Alice’s life before she met Jack is the story of a search for passionate collaboration, and yet she speaks of the times of intense scientific effort as strangely peaceful, as times of cool lucidity in contrast to the