WHAT’S A GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A NICE PLACE LIKE THIS?: So I wrote a thing for the Yale Free Press‘s 2005 commencement issue, about how my Yale education had shaped my career or later life. The YFP hasn’t put that issue online yet, so I’m posting what I wrote, with a few sentences excised because I don’t think they work as well for the general blog audience. (That’s one reason it ends so abruptly.) Enjoy, or not, but keep in mind I was trying to summarize what I think about Life, the Universe, and Everything in as few words as possible, so this piece is suggestive but not exactly a treatise.
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When I first came to Yale–not that I realized this at the time–I was trying to understand three questions: Why is poetry meaningful? Why is sex meaningful? Why is estrangement meaningful? Other people can talk about market economics or national security; I can only sketch how investigating these three questions led me away from left-wing subjectivism and into what you could call conservatism.

Poetry–I apologize for belaboring the obvious–uses images to convey meaning. The swan in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” the sparrow in Hamlet, the vulture in As I Lay Dying, all evoke different reactions and longings; one can’t be changed for another. (“There’s a special providence in the fall of a vulture” is awesome, but not really what Shakespeare was getting at….) And most writers can tell when they find the right image, the one that means what they want to say. But where do these images get their meaning?

Human culture is the most obvious answer. We have various associations with sparrows and vultures because the people around us do. But if this is the whole story, we can only say what our culture allows us to say, and we can use images to speak only about our culture, not about human nature as such. Investigating the possibility that poetic meaning extended beyond the limits of particular cultures led me to a belief in a universal, abiding human nature, and a belief that objects in the world have intrinsic meaning. These beliefs can ultimately only be true if humans, and objects in our world, are “words spoken by God”–but that’s a discussion for another time.

Of sex I’ll say only this: Fun is fun, sometimes. (And sometimes it isn’t.) But the more I thought about why sex would be meaningful–rather than just, you know, nice–the more I suspected that sex attains its greatest philosophical and symbolic (poetic) richness when the union of lovers creates a new life. And yet our current culture seems to view things exactly the other way around, as if sex becomes less interesting, less sexy, when it makes babies. As if the kind (or less-kind) feelings of adults toward one another were more interesting than the beginning of a new human. Bizarre!

As for estrangement… I’ve always had, and I think most reflective people eventually encounter, a sense that something has gone wrong: a sense of exile. Humans are strange creatures, trapped between our aspirations and our acts, between what we are and what we know (or at least believe) we could be. We’re creatures of the subjunctive tense, the might-have, could-have, should-have. A liberal education deepens the longing for beauty and wholeness, while sharpening the pain felt at their absence.

In high school I tried to shrug off this sense of exile: I tried embracing relativism (relativism means never having to say you’re sorry). I tried locating the source of my alienation in my sexual orientation, and identifying “heteronormativity” as the problem (ah, the cultural Left, constantly seeking to create the People’s Republic of Misfit Toys!). But neither solution satisfied; I was avoiding the problem, not addressing it.

All three of these questions shape my work after Yale.