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Evolution invented REM sleep, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night.
But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own — not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes’ costumes of achievement, not your culture’s templates of success. “No one can acquire for another — not one,” Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life, “not one can grow for another — not one,” while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success, concluding: If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success.
Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint. Half a lifetime before taking up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for — Roy captured the crux of our confusion about the real metrics of our lives a passage from her 1999 book The Cost of Living (public library).
Recounting a conversation with an old friend in the wake of the disorienting success of her novel The God of Small Things, Roy finds herself suffocated by the intimation that “the trajectory of a person’s happiness… had peaked because she had accidentally stumbled upon ‘success’” — a notion “premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.” She tells her friend:
You’ve lived too long in New York… There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.
The people who are less successful “in the most vulgar sense of the word,” she observes, are often more fulfilled — like her beloved uncle, who had become one of India’s first Rhodes scholars for his work in Greek and Roman mythology but had chosen to give up his academic career in order to start a pickle, jam, and curry-powder factory with his mother and build balsawood model airplanes in his basement.
When Roy’s friend meets her point with raised eyebrows awning a look of slight annoyance, she takes a moment to distill her thoughts, then writes them on a paper napkin for her friend to hold on to, formulating with that rare and exultant combination of passion and rigor what success really means:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Couple with Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit John Quincy Adams on impostor syndrome and the true measure of success.
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