Samir Chopra's Blog, page 109

A Failure of Kindness

The George Saunders graduation speech currently making the rounds of the Internet reminds me of a failure of kindness of my own.  I have committed many, of course, too many to remember or recount; I pick on this one, because, quite frankly, besides being memorable in all the wrong ways, it is a little less painful to recount than others in my oeuvre.

In 2005, I traveled to India for a vacation and arrived to find New Delhi in the grip of its usual summer baking.  On my second day in the city, I hailed an auto-rickshaw and asked to be taken to a friend’s residence a few miles away. I knew where I was headed; I wasn’t lost; this was ‘my’ city after all, even though I hadn’t lived in it for eighteen years.

A few minutes later, I noticed we were driving away from the direction that I thought we should have been headed in. I held my tongue for a second, and then queried the driver–rather querulously if I may say so–’Where are we going?’ The driver replied, briefly, ‘We need to go in this direction.’ I do not know why I did not bother to inquire further, to employ a principle of charity, and grant him the benefit of the doubt. For a second, I imagined myself ripped off, in my ‘hometown’, by someone who imagined me to be a hapless tourist.  Perhaps I was tired of being told that I was ‘out of touch’ in many dimensions, that I had lost the capacity to relate to the realities of what had once been the familiar, perhaps I was overly keen to assert my ‘authenticity.’ Insecurities, every one of them.

I snapped. And began a loud tirade, mercifully brief, of how I would not be made a fool of, how I knew what time it was.

The auto-rickshaw driver, now with a pained expression on his face, spoke again, softly and perhaps even a little apologetically, ‘We have to go in this direction. There’s no exit permitting us to reverse direction for another half a mile.’ I looked around. He was right. The road I had traveled on many times as a teenager and even on my previous visits to the city had changed: there were new dividers, new sidewalks, new intersections. I was a stranger to it; I needed help getting around. And I was being given some. I just hadn’t seen it.

My indignation subsided, quickly replaced by a scorching shame. I mumbled an apology and attempted rapprochement. I asked him where he was from, sensing from his accent he was not a Delhi local. He wasn’t. He was a migrant, one of those many thousands that flock to the city to escape their impoverished homes, perhaps leaving families behind, resigned to scraping out a day-to-day existence on the margins of an indifferent urban landscape.

We chatted; I told him I was on vacation, in town to meet family and friends.  He asked me where I was visiting from. I told him; he asked me a bit about my life elsewhere.

A few minutes later, I was at my destination. He had taken the quickest, most efficient route possible under the circumstances. I paid up, added a tip, apologized again.

There are times, even now, when I remember the tone of his voice, responding to me when I first accused him of ripping me off, and I cannot but feel just a little miserable.

Colin McGinn and the Exploitation of the Philosophy Job Market

La Affaire Colin McGinn AKA the Handjob That Might or Might Not Have Been, has roiled the philosophy world for some time now. (A couple of Chronicle of Higher Education articles might bring you up to speed; here and here. Because those articles are behind a pay-wall you might do better to google ‘Colin McGinn miami sexual harassment’. An indication of just how old this news is may be gauged from the fact that The New York Times has finally deigned to cover it.)

The most salutary effect of this sordid affair has been the spotlight it has shone on the status of women in academic philosophy: the environment the discipline provides, the levels of sexual harassment, and so on.

I’d like to make a brief note of a factor that I think contributes to the kind of situation McGinn and his student found themselves in.

Philosophy is–like many other humanities disciplines–notorious for its impoverished job market.  (I think I might have noted on this blog that in my two years of job hunting at philosophy departments, I sent 114 applications and received precisely zero calls for an interview.) An adviser’s letter of recommendation and his ability and willingness to go the extra mile in ‘promoting’ a graduate student’s job application still counts for a great deal. This results in a great deal of behavior that is ripe for exploitation by a less than conscientious faculty member: obsequious name-dropping, aggressive socializing–very often fueled by alcohol–and transparent networking. The annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association–where job interviews are conducted–is an unbridled schmooze-fest, as are most post-colloquia receptions. (I still appreciate the first-name informality that is encouraged in the discipline even as I am appalled by the stories or rumors I have heard of gropes, grabs and fumbles following a beer or wine session involving professors and students.)

This, to put it mildly, is a state of affairs primed perfectly for a variety of encounters that can go wrong. Professors are likely to imagine that they are God’s chosen creations, dispensing favors from on high, while graduate students might indulge in self-abnegation, regarding themselves as lowly creatures that need to grovel, wheedle and flatter in order to get by. (If you wanted to really get crude, you could say this was a buyer’s market.)

The McGinn affair shows off the professorial side of this: McGinn’s blog posts reveal a man who has conceived of himself as a suave intellectual combination of Svengali and Henry Higgins, ushering his simpering debutante ward across the threshold of philosophical maturity.  Conversely, his graduate student, conditioned by the behavior that was possibly visible to her, might have realized too late that the parameters of the relationship she was engaged in were inappropriate.

Little can be done about the job market and I do not think informality in interactions between professors and students should be discouraged.

But one simple change might help: it would be great to have more women in philosophy that could act as mentors to its female graduate students.

Note: My previous posts on women in philosophy touch on related topics.

Zoë Heller on the ‘Shocking’ Role of ‘Aesthetic Grounds’ in Moral Judgments:

I quite enjoyed reading Zoë Heller‘s review of Janet Malcolm‘s Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers but I’m not inclined to join her in all the hosannas she sends Malcolm’s way. Consider for instance, the assessment she makes of a judgement offered by Malcolm:

In the absence of moral certainty, Malcolm suggests, our sympathies are assigned on what are essentially aesthetic grounds—on the basis of who has the more attractive language, or the more engaging style. This is a rather shocking proposition and it is meant to be.

I am perplexed by why Heller finds this such a ‘shocking proposition.’ Even if no one has ever expressed the sentiments underlying this claim using precisely the same sequence and composition of words that Malcolm has,  it is underwritten by a host of observations about our sensibilities and judgments that almost tend to the commonplace.

For instance, the distinction between the formal structure of an argument and its rhetorical content, which goes back to Aristotle, has long made it clear humans are persuaded by much more than logic – no matter what the subject matter. This is why the trivium of old consisted of the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric. If not, the study of the first two might have been all that was required.

Or consider that in science, when empirically equivalent theories are candidates for adoption, the choice between them might be made on the basis of an assessment of their simplicity. (‘In the absence of empirical certainty, our theoretical sympathies are assigned on essentially aesthetic grounds, on the basis of which theory is phrased in the more readily comprehensible language,  presented in the more engaging style or makes fewer claims upon our pre-theoretic credulity.’)

For yet another example, note that we prefer the company of, and extend our moral sympathies more readily to, those creatures that remind us the most strongly of ourselves. (‘Lacking certainty over which creatures have inner mental and emotional lives like ours, we are more likely to extend kindness to those that more closely externally resemble us than others.’)

For a mind conditioned by these sorts of reminders that the formal, the empirical, and the moral by themselves do not give us conclusive reasons to pick one option over another, Malcolm’s claim that aesthetic sentiments color our moral judgments will not come as much of a surprise. Indeed, the history of literature, and the complexity of the moral judgments recounted therein should also have primed us to not be taken unawares by such a notion.

Most fundamentally, Heller assumes that moral certainty is more common than it is. But more often than not, we are confronted with moral perplexity; we seek guidance in religion, in popular nostrums and bromides, in teachers, ‘role models’ and punchy slogans. In short, we attempt to solve the problems of moral judgment with a grab-bag of shortcuts, tricks, and satisficing solutions.  The aesthetic dimension of a particular choice cannot but have a prominent role in our final selection.

Malcolm’s keen eye has merely pointed out the existence of such a desideratum in a very particular situation.

Of Academic Genealogies

Yesterday, in a post on this blog, I wrote about the most familiar kinds of genealogies, the familial, and the quest to uncover their details. Today, I want to make note of another kind of genealogy that sometimes obsesses folks like me: our academic ones.

Some thirteen odd years ago, shortly after I had finished my dissertation defense, I sat in the bar room of the Algonquin Hotel, enjoying a celebratory whisky or two with some friends. My dissertation adviser, Rohit Parikh, was in attendance. As we chatted, I said something like, ‘So it continues, from Hartley Rogers [Professor Parikh's dissertation adviser]  to you to me.’ And he replied, ‘Yes, and before that, Alonzo Church.’ On hearing this, I felt absurdly pleased.  My academic lineage could be traced back to the man for whom the Church-Turing thesis was named? Nice work, dude.

It was, as I noted, an ‘absurd’ reaction. But in a community where an immediate academic ancestor had a significant impact on employment and subsequent career prospects, it wasn’t the strangest reaction to have.

A year or so later, I discovered the Mathematical Genealogy project, found an entry for myself,  duly traced my ‘academic family tree’, and came up with the following tale:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz begat Nicolas Malebranche who begat Jacob Bernoulli who begat Johann Bernoulli who begat Leonhard Euler who begat Joseph Lagrange who begat Simeon Poisson who begat Michel Chasles who begat H.A Newton who begat E.H Moore who begat Oswald Veblen who begat Alonzo Church who begat Hartley Rogers who begat Rohit Parikh who begat Samir Chopra.

My initial reaction was that that is a ridiculously distinguished lineage to have.  If I had even a vanishingly small fraction of the mathematical talent on display, I would have won the Turing Award and the Fields Medal by now.

This feeling was all too quickly replaced by another feeling quite familiar to academics: I didn’t belong in there. My mathematical and logical talents are limited; I never rose above competence in my academic work in those domains. I was, you guessed it, an impostor. Indeed, after I had, in an initial burst of enthusiasm, announced the results of my quest to some colleagues and friends, I went mum. Why highlight a line of ancestry that showcased my lack of fit?

A couple of years later, there was even less occasion to talk up my mathematical genealogy: I wasn’t writing papers in logic any more and had moved on to other topics of interest. And besides, I had figured out the only relevant part of my academic genealogy was the node that preceded me; little else mattered. That connection is one I remain proud of for the right reasons: the relationship was, and is, a friendly and intellectually enriching one. And that, I think, is all that should matter.

Note: The following chart–produced by Yifan Hu of the AT&T Shannon Laboratory–shows the second largest tree in the Mathematical Geneaology Project. It shows a total of 11766 mathematicians, with the hundred most prolific dissertation advisers circled: plot_comp2_p2.2_font8. Interestingly enough, ninety-eight percent of the nodes on this tree are leaves i.e., they have no students.  (I thank Noson Yanofsky for sending me this reminder of my incongruous location in this luminous bunch.)

The Genealogy of Moi

In reviewing Francois Weil‘s Family Trees: A History of Geneaology in America (‘In Quest of Blood Lines‘, New York Review of Books, 23 May 2013) Gordon S. Wood, after tracking an older American obsession with family lineage, possibly noble birth and associated family fortune, notes an interesting statistic:

By 2005, a poll found that 73 percent of Americans had become very interested in their family history. They were not searching for pedigree any longer but for identity.

In 1992, on one of my periodic journeys back to India, I grew intrigued by the possibility of tracing my family tree further back than I had ever previously attempted.  Perhaps living in the US had sparked this curiosity but perhaps too, I was old enough to start caring. On the paternal side, I knew my great-grandfather’s name but not my great-grandmother’s; my great-grandfather, was, I think, a doctor. (I can’t remember any more). On the maternal side, my ignorance was almost complete; my knowledge of my family stopped with my grandparents.

In response to my queries, my mother suggested we speak to my paternal grandfather’s cousin, a veritable griot who apparently could rattle off the names of several generations’ heads.  A couple of weeks later we met him in Central India, where we had traveled to visit my grandmother and uncle, and sat him down for a chat.

He didn’t disappoint, naming four predecessors to my grandfather, reaching as far back as the times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. (Apparently, my great-great-great-great-grandfather had served as an official in that regime.) We listened with great interest as my mother made notes in a diary. I asked him a few more questions about the movement of the family within the Punjab and that was it.

A few years later, I had forgotten the conversation, my mother had passed away and her diary had been lost. I resolved to have the same conversation, to record it, to make better notes. That meeting never took place; my grand uncle soon passed away as well. None of his sons–my father’s cousins–had made notes of their family tree either. That was that.

Now that daughter has been born, in Brooklyn, continuing a journey that my family seems to continue to undertake–from the West Punjab to Central India to New Delhi to the east coast of the US–I feel some stirrings of that old interest in my provenance. I doubt there are any familial resources I will be able draw upon; my best bet will be to seek out the Indian equivalent of the National Genealogical Society or ancestry.com.

I don’t know why it should matter. I will not disgraced or honored by my forebears’ deeds. They could have been mass murderers or classical music composers; my life remains my own, with its blessings and curses. And I certainly will not be calling or emailing strangers to say “Hey, we’re cousins, seven times removed!” But I do think that if I ever take this quest on, it will be a useful history lesson of sorts, drawing connections between my life and other places and times and peoples. Just for that filling out of the map, it might be worth it.

Geronimo and the Cruel, Beautiful, West

Yesterday’s post on the continued presence of derogatory team names and mascots in American professional sports was, in part, prompted by my reading of Geronimo‘s autobiography.  It is a short book, an easy read, and comes with an excellent introduction by Frederick Turner. (Geronimo: His Own Story, As told to S. M. Barrett, with introduction and notes by Frederick Turner. Meridian Books, New York, 1996; other than some long quotes in previous histories, this is the first sustained narrative by a Native American that I have read.)

As with most histories of Native Americans, I am left a little numb: the familiar stories of dispossession, a series of betrayals, endless dissembling, and in the case of Geronimo, like some other great chiefs, the humiliations of imprisonment and camp life. By the time Geronimo–after surrendering and becoming a ‘prisoner of war’–has converted to Christianity, started selling bows and arrows at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, and posing for photographs, we are sick of it all.  Death must have been a merciful release from that protracted punishment.

In some previous posts on the American West, I had noted, in passing, the contrasts that that land holds for us: the beauty of its landscape and the cruelty writ large into its history. A couple of eloquent passages  from Turner’s introduction that describe the denudation of the West’s natural inhabitants bring that contrast alive for us.

First, the flora go:

But even the native grasses were being exterminated as the West was made over into farms and ranches: 142 million acres of the continent’s heartland that for millennia had been thronged with big bluestem, blazing star, wild indigo, black Sampson, butterfly milkweed, compass plant, prairie smoke, Scribner’s panicum, golden alexander, shooting star, and prairie dock.

Only the West could inspire descriptions– those startling names!–like that. But it inspired a savage response as well.

And then, writing of California,

In 1848, when gold was discovered in that area, and it was annexed as a state, there were approximately one hundred thousand Indians there; by 1859, that figure had been reduced to thirty thousand; and by the turn of the century there were only a fifteen thousand of the race once described by a devotee of the American way as a ‘set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks as the Lord ever permitted to infect the earth, and whose immediate and final extermination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for.’ To an appalling extent the prayers were answered.

Geronimo died far  from home. In his autobiography he expressed his final wishes:

It is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be, I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish at present, and that our name would not become extinct.

His wish was denied.

Redskins and Indians: America Isn’t Done With the Natives Yet

Years ago, on ESPN, I saw a young African-American player on the Washington Redskins‘ roster  interviewed about the periodic controversy over his team’s name.  The interviewer asked, quite straightforwardly,  ’Do you think the team should change its name?’ The young man, looking worried–perhaps knowing he stood a good chance of offending someone and aware of his own peculiar standing in the debate– replied quickly, ‘If they are offended, then I think we should change the name.’

The ‘they’ in that response are Native Americans, America’s most invisible community. They aren’t extinct–word has it they still exist on reservations–but you wouldn’t know it from the way the Redskins continue to hold on to their moniker. Or the Cleveland Indians their grinning, leering, feathered mascot.  You wouldn’t know it either from the drearily familiar manner in which this debate bogs down every time its embers are raked over: in one corner, those who find these teams’ names and mascots offensive and racist, and in the other, those who shriek ‘political correctness!’ and urge everyone to take the proverbial chill pill. (My posts on this blog should make clear which corner I occupy.)

There is a logic of sorts to the visible, persistent indifference of sports teams–multi-million dollar corporations, each and every one of them. Why should the Washington Redskins or the Cleveland Indians bother? Are there any Native Americans on the boards of the corporations that sponsor them and that might initiate a withdrawal of monies? Are there any Native American Senators or Congressmen who might speak up against them? Heck, do these teams have any Native American fans who might be offended and be able to enlist political and economic support for their complaints? There is no constituency to be offended, no demographic to be consulted.

There is, in short, no commercial imperative to change. There is plenty of incentive not to: the Redskins and the Indians, might, god forbid, look like they had caved; they might look like they weren’t ‘man enough’ to resist the forces of complaint and ‘victimhood.’ Their fans, those who happily buy their tickets and merchandise, and fill their stadiums, all the while emptying their own wallets, certainly don’t care.

It says something about the lack of political visibility, power and reach of the Native American community that this debate persists, that these descriptions still pervade American sporting life. In the extensive catalog of insults directed at that community, these caricatures and derogatory terms are merely the latest entries; the cries of ‘get over it and play the game’ just the latest version of ‘keep your head down, shut up, and keep moving.’ And besides, a community confined to impoverished tracts of land, and battling with poverty, alcoholism, and some of the highest murder and rape rates in the country has much else on its mind.

From displacement to betrayal to humiliation to massacres to insults; America isn’t quite done with its indigenous people. Stick around a while folks, there may be yet another trick up its sleeve.

Reflections on Translations-VI: The Advantages to Philosophy

Over at The New York Times‘ The Stone, Hamid Dabashi writes:

Though it is common to lament the shortcomings of reading an important work in any language other than the original and of the “impossibility” of translation, I am convinced that works of philosophy…in fact gain far more than they lose in translation.

Consider Heidegger. Had it not been for his French translators and commentators, German philosophy of his time would have remained an obscure metaphysical thicket.  And it was not until Derrida’s own take on Heidegger found an English readership in the United States and Britain that the whole Heidegger-Derridian undermining of metaphysics began to shake the foundations of the Greek philosophical heritage. One can in fact argue that much of contemporary Continental philosophy originates in German with significant French and Italian glosses before it is globalized in the dominant American English and assumes a whole new global readership and reality. This has nothing to do with the philosophical wherewithal of German, French or English. It is entirely a function of the imperial power and reach of one language as opposed to others.

Dabashi does not really address what might be termed the ‘linguistic problem’ of translation–the difficulties of rendering sensible specialized technical terms for instance–which often leads to the ‘impossibility’ that he notes. Rather, his concern is with translation as a means for improving access to a philosophical work. And in this dimension, he is certainly on to something. (There has been, for some time now, a possibly apocryphal story making the rounds in philosophy departments, that when the first English translations of Kant appeared, an entire generation of German scholars took up English classes so that they could read Kant in translation–the original German was too obtuse for even native speakers.)

One aspect of this improved access that Dabashi does not touch on is that a greater readership achieved via a successful translation can prompt greater study of the text in the original language. A classic example of this is Nietzsche scholarship. Many students who read him find his prose stylings visible even in translation; they are then told by those fluent in German that his style is even more prominent and pronounced in German; they often decide to learn German to find out for themselves just what the fuss is about. (I have recently come into possession of German-language edition of Nietzsche’s collected works, and my resolve to resume my education in German, interrupted many years ago, has now been considerably strengthened.)

And many serious students of a philosopher will learn a foreign language just so that they can deepen their understanding of the material and try to settle disputes in interpretation for themselves. Their access to their philosopher of interest began, of course, with a translation.

Dabashi’s point about translation giving more than it takes works best, I think, in these kinds of cases–when it sends readers back to the original. His point is compatible with an entirely plausible alternative development: that the translations take on a life of their own, and lend themselves to interpretations and applications not possible with the original, thus becoming an entirely new philosophical work.

Such a development is not to be bemoaned; the student of philosophy now has more to play with.

Hudson Crossings

Yesterday, at the World Trade Center transit station, as I took the escalator down to the PATH train, heading for an afternoon spent with a cousin living in Exchange Place, New Jersey, I made note of a little datum: I’ve been crossing the Hudson–in both directions–for over twenty-five years.  One such crossing, back in 1993, has kept me on the New York side since.

I first crossed the Hudson to arrive at graduate school, taking a combination of the Long Island Railroad and the PATH train to Newark, New Jersey. I was bewildered by the dereliction and disrepair visible in that city when I emerged–eyes blinking in the bright August sunshine–from the Newark subway station. For the next six years, as I studied and worked in New Jersey, the skyline of Manhattan was often visible, tantalizingly promising a great deal that was not present in my daily existence on this side of the Hudson. The two cities, Newark and New York, seemed so close and yet so far.

I crossed often–’escaping’, as I sometimes described it–seeking diversions in all the ways that New York City appeared to offer them: food of all stripes, arthouse movies, live music, raucous bars. Sometimes, I took the NJ Transit trains to arrive at the stuffy, ugly, Penn Station and then headed for the subways; sometimes, the PATH trains to their steaming, malodorous Manhattan stations. (In the late 80s, the subways still featured ample displays of graffiti; these served as a garish welcome to the new urban landscape I had entered after my subterranean travels.) These were journeys that never quite lost their mysterious magic: a displacement from my weekday trials to a place of seemingly endless promise. My returns to New Jersey–after the night’s engagements were done–required expert deployment of train timetables. Or to be more precise, the times of the last train.  A delay or two entailed a sleepless, weary, return at dawn.

New York remained the diversion of choice after I began work in South Central New Jersey; I began graduate school there while commuting for night classes (at the 42nd Street site of the old CUNY Graduate Center). I continued to dream about life in ‘the city.’ Finally, in 1993, I left New Jersey, and moved across the Hudson, up the West Side to 95th Street and Westend. I sold my pickup truck, shook myself free of my ridiculously overpriced auto insurance policy, and began buying subway tokens. I was now a New Yorker.

My crossings of the Hudson though, continued; I returned to visit old friends from school and work. Sometimes barbecues, sometimes children’s birthdays, sometimes trips to the beach, sometimes a Cape May weekend, sometimes a bar hop in Hoboken. New Jersey became my Thanksgiving destination–an annual ritual, observed with some faithfulness every year in Marlboro township. I was the New Yorker friend, the one that required a pickup  from bus and train stations while the other guests arrived in their cars. I saw the state differently; I didn’t drive on its roads anymore.

The Hudson crossing is still an easy one if you don’t drive; its significance for me now resides in its reminding me of a time when I drove on New Jersey’s highways, New York’ profile looming large, just out of reach, a place that was the repository of dreams both practical and idealistic.

A Smoking Career, Suspended

A New York Times article that wonders, ‘Why Smokers Still Smoke‘ set me to thinking: Why did I smoke? For as long as I did?

I smoked my first cigarette in my teen years. My father smoked, as did many of the men–all Air Force pilots–that I idolized. There was glamour and masculinity written all over the act. I loved the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with Old Spice cologne.

Buying cigarettes was easy; the shops that sold them cared little for ID’ing their customers. Disguising the smell wasn’t, so I took refuge in sucking on mints and chewing betelnuts. But I got caught–by my mother. It didn’t stop me, of course. I still smoked the occasional cigarette in high school, and then in university, began smoking every day. My consumption hovered at the half-a-dozen a day for those years, sometimes rising to ten a day. I didn’t buy packs of cigarettes, but like most students, bought them ‘loose’, in singles or pairs. Our budgets just didn’t permit the pack. Indeed, I didn’t begin to purchase packs until after moving to the US and commencing graduate school.

Four years after moving to the US, I tried to quit smoking. I was three months short of my twenty-fifth birthday. On New Year’s Day 1991, I stopped. I stayed tobacco-free for more than two years, surviving 1991, 1992 and the first five months or so of 1993. Then, on a hike in the Himalayas, I stopped at a mountaineering expedition’s base camp and the porters, after a hearty and friendly conversation, offered me a beedi. I accepted. I don’t know why. Perhaps, at that moment, overcome by euphoria and the friendship on display, I felt I couldn’t decline. My defenses had been breached. A few weeks later, during a long train journey through India, I smoked again. I had fallen off the wagon.

But from then on, my smoking was always sporadic; I was always in between attempts at quitting. I began my doctoral studies in the fall of 1993 and smoked heavily the first year, all the while regretting it. I quit in 1994 for a few weeks; I tried again in 1995 and 1996. In 1997, I succeeded again, staying off cigarettes till I had finishing my Ph.D in 2000. But on the day of my successful defense, drunk and disordered, I smoked again. I was off the wagon once more.

I moved to Australia after my Ph.D and quit several more times. Each of these episodes lasted days or weeks, never months. In 2001, I quit for a few months before starting again, as I struggled to cope with the stress of my job hunt.  In 2002, during a trip to Tokyo for a conference, an Australian graduate student urged me to throw away my half-full pack of Marlboros. I did, and stayed off cigarettes for a few months. In 2003, I began again. My girlfriend smoked.

In November 2003, we went away for a weekend to Cape May. My father’s 68th birth anniversary fell during that weekend. On that day, the two of us awoke and set out for breakfast. On the way, we stopped at a local bookstore, and I bought a biography of a US Navy pilot. As I did so, my girlfriend asked me if I was paying tribute to my father. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it was probably true. A few minutes later, we arrived at our diner. In those days, you could still smoke indoors in eating establishments. Our coffees arrived, and we reached for our cigarettes. At that moment, I thought that this day seemed like as good a day as any other to quit smoking. So I did. My girlfriend–who is now my wife–quit for good a few months later.

I haven’t smoked cigarettes since.  The pattern I noticed in my quitting and restarting was that initially, I fell off the wagon because I was trying to celebrate something; later, I responded adversely to stress. But once I had tried to quit and succeeded for as long as I did, it became clear to me I didn’t want to smoke. So every cigarette from there on became a mark of failure, one I vainly attempted to disguise. It didn’t work and my compulsion to quit, even if almost always unsuccessful, remained strong.

I still fear the damage I did to my body all those years; perhaps I haven’t escaped tobacco’s cancerous embrace. For now, I’ll just hope I’ve managed to dodge the bullet.