Napoleonic ambitions

I picked up An Unsentimental Education, edited by Molly McQuade, which is a collection of interviews/monologues by famous writers who are in some way connected to the University.

In it, Saul Bellow talks about coming to the U of C at 17, with only "cloudy yearnings" of becoming a writer. He found a group of similar people - people like Isaac Rosenfeld and Oscar Tarcov. Bellow says:

The great advantage of the U of C was that it gave us a cover, a color of legitimacy...The quadrangles gave a certain cultural weight to our flimsy or sketchy aspirations...The students gathered in the Wieboldt Lounge to listen to discussions about Eliot, Proust, and Kafka were secretly filled with Napoleonic ambitions. They didn't dare to announce publicly what they so passionately and madly aspired to.

In one sense the U of C today has many things in common with that College Bellow attended. The U of C brand allows the students a certain pass on being pretentious, since it's only pretentiousness if you are pretending, and at the U of C, people really can grow up to do great, Earth-shattering things. And certainly I have learned here how to dress up what was essentially a hunch or an inkling or even a suspicion so that it was indistinguishable from academics; put a few quotes in, a couple citations, some really good explanatory footnotes, then put a thesis on the top, a conclusion on the bottom and BANG: you got yourself an essay.

The discussions Bellow talks about also ring true today. We do talk about such things. Maybe not as often as Bellow did - I always conceive of people of his era just studying all the time, reading the Aeneid in Latin in their spare time, but then again he never had facebook, so no wonder. A lot of students hide their "Napoleonic ambitions", but many don't.

That, I think, is the difference, the thing that makes the U of C today different from the U of C of his day. We are encouraged to have dreams of conquering Europe, and we are never told of possible Waterloos lurking up ahead. Of course, failure is something we are already familiar with, so we need no education in that range of possible outcomes of our lives.

Part of it, I guess, is what our passions are. Academia is certainly something people have no qualms about revealing as their destination in life, though it is usually put in terms of "I plan to go to grad school" or "I'm thinking of getting a PhD." Those are almost the unambitious people, just following the easiest, in a way, path out of this school.

The ambitious people are the ones who want to go into business or law or medicine...sometimes known as the professions. They are the people who might conceal their plans - though a fair share practically introduce themselves as "John Doe, pre-med" or "Jane Smith, consultant".

As for the writers, I know of only a handful of people (undergrads, that is) who will say that - that they want to be writers. There's still such a mystique about the whole thing. For them, it seems, Bellow is still right.