Peripheral Visions

continuity.
    Even in our change-emphasizing culture, we often reconstruct and romanticize the past to emphasize continuity, and we retell the lives of great men and women as if their destinies were fixed from childhood. Henry Ford is said to have lost his heart to the first horseless carriage he saw as a child; Teresa of Avila is said to have tried to run away to be martyred by the Moors; mothers of musicians describe their children’s response to the radio—you see, these stories suggest, this child was already on the path to this particular kind of greatness. Children are offered models of achievement that minimize discontinuity, proposing a single rising curve of development, marked with a rhythm of recognizable milestones: promise in childhood, preparation in youth, continuing progress in adulthood.
    The traditional model of a successful life does not include radical new beginnings halfway through—these, by implication, are only necessary when a life has gotten onto the wrong track—but we do have an alternative story type in which the plot involves a major shift, repudiating a bad course and turning onto a good one. In his Confessions , St. Augustine emphasized the wickedness of his early ways, highlighting his conversion, and so did Malcolm X in his Autobiography . This way of construing the past is increasing through the development of twelve-step programs, which require that some moment be identified as touching bottom, after which ascent becomes possible. Narratives of discontinuity offer the chance to leave the past behind, the good as well as the bad, yet anyone who claims the liberating experience of being born again must also face again the groping learning of an infant. Some people handle a transition like the disintegration of a marriage by amplifying discontinuity: moving to a new town, growing a beard, getting a makeover, becoming a new person, erasing affection in legal fights. Others minimize the change: “We haven’t gotten on for years,” they say. “All we did was to make it official.”
    Often those who have made multiple fresh starts or who have chosen lives with multiple discontinuities are forced by the standard ideas of the shape of a successful career to regard their own lives as unsuccessful. I have had to retool so often I estimate I have had five careers. This does not produce the kind of résumé that we regard as reflecting a successful life, but it is true of more and more people, starting from the beginning again and again. Zigzag people. Learning to transfer experience from one cycle to the next, we only progress like a sailboat tacking into the wind.
    A single rising curve is unlikely to reflect the lives of very many in a world where life expectancies approach and then pass seventy. Now the norm of a successful life more often involves repeated new beginnings and new learning. All those who become immigrants and refugees, displaced housewives and foreclosed farmers, workers whose skills are obsolete and entrepreneurs whose businesses are destroyed will have to learn new skills. Increasingly, returning to the classroom and sometimes totally shifting gears from one identity to another will be fundamental to adult development. We will become aware that a zigzag, seen from another angle, may be a rising spiral, so that readjustments are a record not of failure but of growth. Beyond a certain level of economic and technological development, any society must become a learning society, one in which many of the most talented and energetic members have more than one career, as athletes and military people do today. Learning is the new continuity for individuals, innovation the new continuity for business. Each requires a new kind of self-definition.
    The traditional tales of achievement or of conversion, whatever suspense and danger were built in along the way, were always cultural constructions, fabricated to make the confusing realities of life fit in with ideas like salvation or progress. People from different cultural traditions see the past differently, whether they are glorifying the industrial revolution or justifying their individual choices, but any cultural theory of the life cycle is likely to leave some people feeling that their own narratives do not measure up. Our narratives are becoming more complicated and ambiguous, and the culturally given plotlines are likely to mislead. The continuities of the future are invisible, horizons in shades of blue we have not