Composing a Life

win and not let everyone who is following you be destroyed. If you adopt profitability as a criterion, it is not a necessity to be a bastard. But in crisis mode things get out of hand. You can’t have expectations of the other party. You can wish for them but you have to act on observations of reality as it really is.”
    Nevertheless, when there is a rent in the canvas, a discord in the harmony, a betrayal, it is important not only to recover but to discover a new and inclusive pattern of meaning. Part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design. There is a famous story about a Chinese master painting a landscape. Just as he is nearly finished, a drop of ink falls on the white scroll, and the disciples standing around him gasp, believing the scroll is ruined. Without hesitating, the master takes the finest of hair brushes and, using the tiny globe of ink already fallen, paints a fly hovering in the foreground of the landscape. For a large and wealthy institution, criticism is like the buzzing of a fly, but the purpose here is to discover grace and meaning in a picture larger still.

ELEVEN
FITS AND STARTS

    A S A COLLEGE STUDENT , I read Erik Erikson’s book on the life cycle,
Childhood and Society
, and then his second book, on Martin Luther. Like every other student encountering those works, I asked myself how I was doing in resolving my own identity crisis. I had spent my senior year of high school in Israel and had come back to the United States to start college with a deep sense of dividedness, of having first found a new sense of myself in Israel and then having left that clarity behind. The new task was to combine and translate, to put an American gentile identity together with my Israeli experience and to use my college education to shape them into some new whole.
    Like many people, I understood Erik’s concept of identity as single, something ideally achieved once and enduring for a lifetime, although sometimes deferred or incomplete. But in recent years, he and Joan have increasingly emphasized that although certain crises—moments of opportunity and danger—are focused at particular points in the life cycle, each is prefigured in earlier experience, and each must be addressed again and again. Joan described her conviction that she could be a dancer in the classic language of their early work, as a moment of knowing that she had become most fully herself. But her life is the story of shaping other meaningful commitments from that early certainty, of improvising and piecing together. Each of us has repeatedly had to pose the question of who we are.
    Women are accustomed to tasks that have to be done again and again, tasks undone almost as soon as they are done. The dinner is eaten right after it is cooked, and there will be another dinner to think about tomorrow; the bed is unmade every night. But most work is repetitive even if one is not making the same bed or washing the same dishes. Still, there are skills that improve and tasks that stay done, if not forever then for a long time, like building a new roof or planting a tree. There is a special satisfaction to repetitive tasks that have an underlying, barely perceptible rhythm of change, such as washing and folding blue jeans that grow gradually larger over the course of a childhood, or preparing a dish that has been served over and over that suddenly provides the setting for newly mature conversation. Of Johnnetta’s three sons, Aaron, her second son, had the hardest time with her divorce and the move to New York, which took him out of his high school just before his senior year. Then when he moved on to become a student at NYU, the evenings in their Brooklyn apartment had a completely new quality. “He is just one righteous kid to be around now. Those two years in New York with Aaron at NYU were such fun for me, both of us working late at night and writing, and he’d want to talk through a paper. Not that we’re colleagues, but that he encouraged a kind of mentoring that I have really enjoyed.”
    The same kind of spiral underlies the shaping and reshaping of identity, as gradually we have more to work with and we become skilled in reconstruction. I ask myself what I would do if my life hit another deep chasm of discontinuity like the Iranian revolution or a move to another country. Even as I reject the idea, I realize that