A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [69]
Mark Twain’s childhood dream was to become a riverboat pilot. As a boy in the late nineteenth century, Twain obsessed about learning to navigate a riverboat on the Mississippi River and wanted the prestige and command that went with the job. In Life on the Mississippi, he recounts his journey to fulfill his dream. He describes learning to “read” the river like an expert but losing the sense of awe that had drawn him to piloting in the first place. He wrote:
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river … All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
And yet, as other passages reveal, even after learning the hazards of the Mississippi that lay beneath her beauty, he is still able to evoke and love her charms, to see her qualities, to feel his own passion about life on the river. His ability to overcome even the most sabotaging moments of cynicism and despair is his triumph.
Everyone, especially young people, must learn that their ideals need not be casualties of their confrontations with reality. I learned this early, from what Dr. King and so many others tried to convey to me, and that lesson itself was a gift. It has made all the difference. I have had my setbacks and outright failures, like anyone else. But I have managed to avoid the apathy, pessimism, and even immobilizing sadness that so often come in the wake of struggle. Idealism is an act of will, to be sure. But we are all up to it—and nothing of any lasting value happens without it.
That lesson must be learned again and again, generation after generation, because I am convinced that cynicism, spawned by disappointment, cultivated by the media, and perpetuated by too many leaders today, holds us back. The courage to look a challenge straight in the eye, to measure our reality against our ideals, and to strive to close the distance between the two has been the hallmark of the American experience. Cynicism is the greatest challenge to that tradition. All of us, but especially young people, must learn to resist it, to nurture our optimism, and to imbue that idealism in others.
That skill comes more naturally to some than others. When I worked for President Clinton in the Justice Department, I remember being struck by his oratorical and political skills. He was a master at reading public opinion. At the same time, he had little appetite for shaping it. Once, not long after I had been appointed, he called me while I was back in Boston for the weekend. I was standing near the checkout counter in the Sears at the South Shore Plaza, not far from our home, when the bulky government cell phone rang.
“Mr. Patrick, this is the White House operator calling,” said a brisk, authoritative voice. “Please hold for the president.”
“Wait, wait,” I said, flustered. “I’m in the middle of a mall. May I find a quiet place and call right back?”
I got a number and made my way to the hair salon where my sister worked, on the second floor of the mall. She let me sit in a supply closet, where I could