The Impossible Dream

When I finally read the book “Don Quichote” I wondered why so many people called it a classic…

The plot was long and rambling, the jokes were crude, and most of it was plain boring. An author who goes on in this longwinded way for over five hundred pages is someone I would consider a candidate for capital punishment. Although the historical sidenotes were interesting as they told a lot about life in 16th-17th century Spain, I was at a loss why such a story had ever become popular.

Ironically, the answer came from an artistic genre that in contrast to literature is often considered to be at the bottom of the lowest ranks of artistic status, barely resisting the attempts by some official artists to kick it into the gutter. I am talking about the musical. Since cultural consensus seems to be that the more popular something is, the less artistic it is, musicals are often considered to be only slightly more cultural than the average first-league soccer match. However, some musicals really are very good. Such a one is Man of La Mancha, an adaptation of Cervantes’ book.

In this case, I learned more about the true nature of Don Quichote by reading the three-page synopsis in the booklet accompanying the CD than I had wrestled from 500+ pages of Cervantes. The author, Dale Wasserman, had sifted through the apparent goal of Cervantes to satirize the then-popular chivalry stories (in which he may have succeeded in literature, though they are seeping back through children’s programs) and found why so many people found the character of the Don so appealing: his nobility and idealism.

“Come, enter into my imagination, and see him: Boney, hollow faced, eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. He conceives the strangest project ever imagined ...To become a knight errant and sally forth into the world, righting all wrongs!”

In Cervantes’ world, as in our own, as undoubtedly also in the “chivalrous” time of king Arthur, such noble behaviour was probably rare to non-existent. After all, are people not always in a world where they have to fight another to survive? Where the word “I” is the most frequently used word in the English language (and also, note, the only non-name which has a capital), and where people seem to spend 95+% of their time thinking about themselves, always asking “what can I get out of it” first.

Yet for some reason this does not seem to be the answer to find happiness, and the most commonly-used remedy, grabbing even more for yourself, does not seem to help either. Far too many people, when they stop to think about their lives (which most of us avoid to do for good reasons), feel an eerie similarity to a text from “trainspotting”:
“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future.
Choose life”.

As I understand, this is a poem from John Hodge, but as all good poetry, it tells us also about other people than Mr. Hodge. Just as our complex brains crave religion and art and yachts and jewelry and parties while cats can lead contented lives just by eating, walking in the garden, washing themselves and sleeping, we may not be basically suitable for living only to satisfy our immediate biological and material needs. Is There More?

And while, as in trainspotting, heroin might be the alternative to “Life”, it is not the answer. Enter the Don.


“Chandler: Hey, you guys in the living room all know what you want to do. You know, you have goals. You have dreams. I don't have a dream.
Ross: Ah, the lesser known "I Don't Have a Dream" speech.”
--Friends

Some people say that happiness is sitting behind the TV with your phone off-line and a packet of chocolate chip cookies. Considered by a soldier marching through a steaming swamp in Bogga-Bogga, pestered by mosquitos, sucked dry by leeches, shouted at by his sergeant and shot at by rebels using the guns his government sold them last year when they still were the “good guys”, this might look like the summit of happiness. Unfortunately, comfort waxes dull after a while. After a while, we become restless, and ask ourselves “is this all?”

And here comes the Don. Having a vision, he has no doubt where he should go. He has no doubt as to what he should do. He has no doubt as to what his task is and what his role is in the world. He knows why he is important. He knows that he will make the world a better place by doing his Quest. By following his dream. An impossible dream mayhaps, fighting against odds far greater than himself, going on marches longer than anyone could endure, facing fears greater than anyone should be asked to face. Yet his vision is the inner fire that keeps him burning, that makes him strong, much stronger than his old body and bony frame seem to support.

“Wanted: vision. The bigger the better. Please respond at number…”

Indeed. I want a vision. I feel I need a vision. Working in an university group that probably reflects much of society in its non-Quichotsm, where publications seem more important than research, where money outweighs moraility, where your professor does not condemn you for your lack of vision but for having a vision, no matter how small (visions can be unpractical, after all) I do not feel that I want or should spend the rest of my life this way. Of course, I have four free days now and could go to the cinema and see movies and forget, and go to the bar and have ten drinks and forget, but I’d rather tackle it here and now. It has been said that in life there are only two pains, the pain of discipline (fear?) and the pain of regret, and that the pain of regret can only grow larger in time, while that of discipline and will grows smaller.

So that’s why I want a vision, why I feel I need a vision to stay/become a happy, healthy individual instead of an introverted hermit seeking recluse in books and dreams.

However, even getting a dream is not easy, sometimes it even feels impossible. The impossible dream. Let me tell you what happened to me recently.

Since I do not yet know what I want to do after my PhD, I followed a course on career orientation last week. In it, we were asked to describe a vision. Well, led by the course leader, I had a vision and drew a picture of it, as was required to “activate the right half of your brain”. So actually, the vision was quite easy. The problem was, when I had drawn it, it didn’t seem to be any fun, just a different kind of boredom.

This upset the instructors, since I was supposed to simply use my “right brain” to envision the job I would love, then picture it in detail, and then start to get it. Using one of the classical training paradigms, they advised me that since this method did not work for me, I should try more of it, and create three dreams: a nightmare, an ideal situation, and a realistic situation.

Being a very obedient and open-minded person I have tried to do so during the last few days. Actually, the nightmare was very easy: what I am doing now, only with the bad things enlarged and the fun things eliminated. However, when imagining my perfect situation, I only got so far as to realize that I would like to drink fresh orange juice for my breakfast again, but my dream job remained as elusive as ever. For while in our culture there are opposites for adjectives and such, good-bad, ugly-beautiful, fat-thin, there are no opposites for nouns. The opposite of a boring postdoc would just be “something that is not a boring post-doc”, but that does not narrow down the job search very much.

I felt quite discouraged. And even now I do not feel particularly hopeful.

But then I realized that a vision is not something that is out of my reach. The complaint of my professor that I had too much vision, despite the fact that his own vision capacity seems to be able to incorporate only visions of 1.2 mm in radius or less, indicates that there is some kind of vision seed in me that might just grow if it were watered properly. And I remembered that there had been times in my life when I had been enthusiastic about things. When I was ten years old, I loved to read books on how you could do cool physics experiments at home, like weighing someone with water-scales, or making trees of crystalline silver. When I was eleven, my father found a nice chemistry book for me to read in the vacation, and with enormous pride I wrote down in my personal journal the two first mysterious but powerful formulas to describe and understand the world: CO2 and CaCO3. Then I started to learn the periodic table by heart. When I was 16 years old, I loved programming and computer languages and scoured Hilversum library for computer books. Then my chemistry teacher asked me to participate in the National Chemistry Olympiad, and I had a vision that I would win and a journalist would interview me for the paper. Well, I did not win. The first time. But the second time, the journalist came. Actually, it became a crappy interview in which I was unpleasantly surprised to see myself portrayed as an arrogant, close minded young snob. But the strange thing was that when I had that vision I had a sort of calm certainty that This Was What Was To Be. It was just in the meantime, when I was doing the actual difficult tests and being surrounded by many other very clever students competing that I despaired.

The last time I can clearly remember having a vision –and here this story is biting itself in its tail- was when I saw a musical in Leiden by the amateur company Triade. It was a nice enough compilation of existing musical numbers, but stronger than what I saw was the thought that pervaded me: I want to do this! I had a vision and a strong desire to stand on the stage, to dance, to sing, to act, but above all to stand there and say the Truth to the audience. As I write this down it sounds a bit silly, but emotionally, my fire was kindled.

Despite the gaping unbelief of all singing teachers I have before and afterwards encountered, I proceeded to prepare for the upcoming audition with great discipline and enthousiasm, and indeed got a very good role as the Sheriff of Nottingham, announcing to the audience some of the truest words in the entire musical

“Het volk is dom, laf
Niet in staat zijn eigen keuzes te maken
Dus… doe ik dat graag voor ze”
---
“People are stupid and cowardly
They cannot make their own choices
So I gladly do it for them”

-“Robin Hood” - Ajolt Elsakkers/Jeroen Smits/Sandra van der Thoorn

Indeed, the time has come to be brave and smart and make new choices, unless I want that my father, my professor or someone else makes them for me.

Perhaps, refecting on my visions, they teach me some things. First, that for me a vision is not triggered by sitting in my room quietly watching TV or something, but by a environmental trigger that inspires me, be it a book, a teacher or a show. Perhaps this means that I should not ponder and wait and try to “dream the impossible dream”, but to go out into the world and seek new impulses, and hope that while most will be uninteresting, somewhere there will be one or two that can trigger me.

Second, most visions last a while but not your life. I still like chemistry a lot but won’t consider a career in synthesis. I will probably continue programming computers for a while but I do not want it to consume my entire life. Acting can be fun, and singing is nice, but based on my experience with Triade I have decided that being a professional musical star is not the career that I covet most. A vision is not forever, but it gives you energy and a growth spurt, and the consequences gained and the lessons learned remain in you forever, lingering but helping you in odd moments when you can use a stray acting lesson to calm a stage-fearing colleague, or an old chemistry law to explain a strange enzymatic phenomenon. A vision may be a sign to grow in a direction, to achieve it, then to release it and continue. You grow all the time, and God is smiling.


Thought for the day:

Much too often we “go through the movements” of our daily routine. We have allocated some time in our schedules for cleaning our room, checking our e-mail, preparing our food. But often these things are done more efficiently and with more joy if we first think about what we want to achieve with these activities, write that goal down (on paper or mentally) and then do the task. You become more productive, and also happier because you again remember that you do things because you want certain things, not because you should do them.

Exercise: for ten things you “have to” do today, write down what you want to achieve with them, what would be the ideal goal? Then do them, and see how often you reach the goal, or come close…