Composing a Life

looking again at a patchwork of achievements both personal and professional and questioning how they fit together: whether they composed—or began to compose—a life; whether indeed the model of improvisation might prove more creative and appropriate to the twentieth century than the model of single-track ambition. Thinking about myself and about other women I have known, some of them proud and contented and others embittered and angry, I decided that the place to look for the key to new patterns was in lives that were clearly composite. Such a key may be helpful in understanding not only how women make sense of interrupted and discontinuous lives, but also in understanding the goals of education and the terms of men’s lives today. All of us are increasingly torn between conflicting loyalties, yet our lives are longer and more full of possibilities than ever before.
    Change proposes constancy: What is the ongoing entity of which we can say that it has assumed a new form? A composite life poses the recurring riddle of what the parts have in common. Why is a raven like a writing desk? How is a lady like a soldier? Why is caring for an infant like designing a computer program? How is the study of ancient poetry like the design of universities? If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?
    I have chosen to explore these subjects by examining five lives—my own and those of four friends. All have faced discontinuities and divided energies, yet each has been rich in professional achievement and in personal relationships—in love and work. We are different from each other, but we have many things in common. This book is the outcome of a process of conversation and reflection. It is a way of making these lives available to others in a form that differs both from the extended narratives of heroic biography or case history on the one hand and the lost individuality of the survey on the other.
    These are not representative lives. They do not constitute a statistical sample—only, I hope, an interesting one. As I have worked over the material, I have become aware that the portions of these life histories that interest me most are the echoes from one life to another, the recurrent common themes. Teasing these out of a wealth of material and conversation and recognizing aspects of my own experience in different forms has been the process that I found personally most freeing and illuminating. We need to look at multiple lives to test and shape our own. Growing up with two talented and very different parents, I have never looked for single role models. I believe in the need for multiple models, so that it is possible to weave something new from many different threads.
    The recognition that many people lead lives of creative makeshift and improvisation surely has implications for how the next generation is educated and what we tell our sons and daughters. The American version of liberal-arts education, since it is not closely career oriented, provides a good base for lifelong learning and for retraining when that becomes necessary, but the institutions themselves often exemplify the opposite. Grassy campuses across the country beckon graciously to children leaving home for the first time; although they are no more than way stations for their graduates, they still suggest the old norm of lifetime commitment and security. For those who work in them, they represent it even more clearly than a monastery would, or a family farm. In effect, the best of our young men and women are educated by faculties deeply committed to continuity. Most of them have spent their entire lives in a single institution, often surrounded by the apparent tranquility of a small town, and may no longer be intellectually flexible or open to change. Ardent walls covered with ivy are more lovely than tents and trailers, but we need to teach the skills for coming into a new place and quickly making it into a home. When we speak to our children about our own lives, we tend to reshape our pasts to give them an illusory look of purpose. But our children are unlikely to be able to define their goals and then live happily ever after. Instead, they will need to reinvent themselves again and again in response to a changing environment.
    Once you begin to see these lives of multiple