by David Kordahl

After the first Cub Scouts meeting of the new year, I stood outside the Scout hut chatting with two other dads, both of them doctors. I am also called “doctor” at work, mostly by premed students who are enrolled in their required physics course, but it’s not the same—for many reasons, but only one that I think about.

It was dark outside, and chilly. Shreveport had experienced a week of snow, during which our unprepared city had shut down. We discussed what each of our families had done during the pause. Two of us had stayed home, venturing out only to sled, but the other doctor revealed that he had missed the entire ordeal.

He had been on vacation in Madagascar, after a short stop in Paris. He took out his iPhone and showed us how he and his wife, the surgeon, had posed with the tigers lounging harmlessly on the grounds of their resort.

First, a disclaimer. As a newly tenured professor at a small college, I do fine, but I’m not wealthy. My family’s winter trip had me, my wife, and our three children trekking up to Minnesota in a Toyota minivan. My household income is right around the American median, which makes me something like a global five-percenter. In objective terms, it’s unreasonable to complain about this.

But the doctor’s pictures got me thinking. When I was myself a college student, my mom, like many parents, had hoped for her son to become the right kind of doctor. I steadily refused. I sneered at the premeds, whose intellectual attitudes seemed to me boringly pragmatic. They were the dull drones, focusing on rote memorization and grade-grubbing, while I, dear reader—I was an intellectual.

Of course, one part of “being an intellectual” (and, of course, I would have never put it that way, back when I thought I really had a shot at it) is not to care too much about creature comforts. Consider Paul Erdős, proving theorems out of his suitcase, or Simone Weil, laboring in a factory to understand the working class. A certain level of self-abnegation should be tolerated for a decade or two.

Yet now, as I approach midlife (forty in October), I find myself having built no great theory, having written no great book. I am a respectable member of the local establishment, a reliable component of the academic infrastructure.

And I have to ask: what the fuck am I doing here? Read more »