What do you do?
I’ve been asked that a lot in my life. As I child and teen, I was asked, what do you want to do? But that question dies on the tongue of the speaker after you reach a certain age. What do you want to do becomes a more localized question – to be asked, say, on vacation. It is not a request for a mission statement. Because, presumably, at some point in the twenties, your mission was set.
In the Oxford English dictionary, published in 1913, the word “career” for the course of a professional life is a “modern usage”. Career, up until the early nineteenth century, was more normally used for horses – horses careering, or galloping. The late latin root, here, is a word for cart. Or a word designating the road a cart takes. A way, in other words. A way and a race. The Occidental variant on the Dao.
In fact, the Hollywoodish way of talking about a career at the moment is a “journey”. My journey. And not, say, my rat race – we don’t even want to smell a rat race when we talk of our journey. But careers, in as much as they are races, are defined by rivalries. This sets the career apart from, say, Being in as it is figured in an ancient Greek poem, where a man tells this tale: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.
The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.
The two choices in Parmenides are pretty stark, and they do seem to subtend the question: what do you do? If you leave the beaten track of men, if this is your “search”, you might look back on your path, the race you raced, and wonder: where is everybody?
I wonder that all the time.
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