Composing a Life

continually invaded by wild-flowers that we are reluctant to pull out. Our days are reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Portrait by a Neighbour,” even when we try to be most disciplined: “Her lawn looks like a meadow, / And if she mows the place / She leaves the clover standing/And the Queen Anne’s lace!”
    The basic model of women’s traditional role has always involved the simultaneous tug of different tasks. Today, there may be long gaps between the period of caring for young children and the period of caring for aging parents, but these tasks overlapped when lives were shorter and child-bearing went on longer. Obviously, it is possible to care for an infant and a bedridden elder simultaneously, to work for several hours a day at a carpet loom with an ear open for calls and only occasionally burn the soup. I’ve watched Betty Steele, the director of the Academic Computing Center at Amherst, working in exactly the same way, struggling with complex budgeting or programming problems, interrupted again and again by students asking for help. There is a heritage here of responsiveness and interruptibility. It was the same for Alice. As director of research at Demonics, she was surrounded by engineers focusing on resolving separate problems, but she was always aware of the larger whole, bringing her engineers back on track when they became trapped in blind alleys.
    Certainly this quality of broadly focused concern and interruptibility enables some important skills and hobbles others. There are tasks that really do require extended narrow concentration, but there are others that require a willingness to shift gears rapidly and think about more than one thing at once. Corporations, institutions, even nations are sometimes led successfully for a time by individuals who focus on single goals, but this narrowness is destructive in the long term. It is like the problem of monocrops: researchers develop a genetically uniform strain of wheat or tomatoes to maximize some single characteristic and then arrange for the planting of unvaried acres of that crop—which could potentially be wiped out by a single plague.
    Julian Gibbs, who was in his second year as president when I went to Amherst, was a man of dogged attention to one issue at a time. When he was worried about some issue—for instance, the recurrence of sexual harassment in Amherst’s fraternities, which he had permitted to operate if they would admit women—he would raise that issue in whatever setting he happened to be in, often in monologue form, not noticing that the other person had some quite different issue in mind. Julian was apparently an able theoretical chemist and had postdoctoral researchers working under him continuing his projects, but when he was involved in a critical stage of the research, he would keep a blackboard in his office, covered with diagrams and formulas, and lecture whoever came in. It was not much use being either the baby that cries or the baby that smiles, the president was preoccupied.
    For me, the excitement of being at Amherst lay in the challenge of trying to keep track of many issues at once, with almost no one around me paying attention to the way these issues fitted together. The college was a complex organism with many different activities interlocking in different ways, surviving in a complex environment. A given day would bring an immediate urgency, like a black student complaining of unfairness in one of the science departments; a long-term question about how to include new library shelving in a grant application; a discussion of research on desert saints in the patristic period or the genetics of sea urchins; and a conversation about computer networking with another institution. The only thing I could be committed to was the complex whole, with all its ecological interrelationships, and yet the different departments continued to see themselves as competitors. Sometimes I felt as if a whole living planet were turning in my mind, with no one around me willing to share my vision.
    The corporate world as it is currently constituted puts a high premium on narrow focus. Only a few people filter through the layers of corporate specialization with a capacity to deal with the multiple issues of a complex organization in its environment. To meet this need, business educators go back, again and again, to the value of the liberal arts and the need to educate generalists. Yet most professors are also narrow, quite