Burnt-out cases
Thomas Merton wrote in his journal 70 years ago, "One of the most terrible fears is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel." I relate to this fear. In fact, lately, because I've been reading Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, I'm thinking it has already happened. The protagonist in A Burnt-Out Case is Querry, a renowned European architect who shows up at a leprosy hospital in Belgian Congo, with no intention ever to leave. He isn't there to help, just to be far from his former life.
The head doctor in the hospital, also a European, describes some patients as "burnt-out cases": the disease has consumed everything in the person that it can, and the person can go freely about the world again -- damaged, to be sure, but no longer infectious. Cured. The notion of burnout eventually gets applied to Querry. He understands himself as emotionally toxic, his career as so much straw. At some point, though, his pride and cruelty have burned through their fuel, and he is able to design and build hospitals to meet local needs. Greene suggests that burnout can be therapeutic in a way.
I've been thinking about my own academic burnout in relation to Querry. I still wish I hadn't burned out, but quitting my tenured job and thereby losing a major part of my identity did allow me to grow in different directions. And yet I also wonder if, in fact, I never fully burned out, and as a result, I'm still hanging onto something diseased in my relation to work. I still tend toward obsessiveness. (You should see this paragraph's revision history!) I still expect a lot of myself and my students, now as a part-time adjunct lecturer, and I get frustrated when my perhaps-unrealistic ideals aren't met. But would I just do lackluster work, dishonest work, without those ideals? Do I in fact need the disease?
I read A Burnt-Out Case as part of my effort to tell the story of burnout's emergence in our culture. (This is for my book on burnout.) I have yet to determine to what extent, if any, Greene's 1960 novel influenced the emergence of burnout as a condition of concern in the early 1970s. Querry is, in important ways, a lot like those whom psychologists first labeled as burned out. But the psychologists mostly see burnout in negative terms. So do I. Still, I find Greene's note of optimism attractive: that something spiritually richer may lie beyond burnout.
Some announcements:
I'll be speaking Tuesday morning on "When Your Job Harms Your Soul: The Broken Spiritual Promise of the American Work Ethic" as part of Abilene Christian University's long-running Summit conference. Then in a few weeks I will speak on a panel about academic labor at UT-Arlington's Hermanns lecture series on Friday, October 4. I would be happy to speak on these or other topics at a university or conference near you!
And some recommendations:
Christina Larocco on writing history as creative nonfiction. Christina is a(n) historian and friend who is working on a terrific biography-in-essays of Martha Schofield, the nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionist and feminist. Christina engages her source material personally, through her own life, and the result is that you just keep wanting to learn more about a little-known but fascinating historical figure. In this essay on the Brevity blog, Christina explains how she does it. Her advice: find your voice, get personal, show your work. (And here's an example of what Christina does: an essay on Little Women, Gilmore Girls, Buffy, and much more.)
Anne Helen Petersen wrote a provocative newsletter yesterday on how, as consumers, we contribute to others' burnout. We often think of ourselves as burnout's victims (OK, I do), but we rarely realize how we're its perpetrators, too. Burnout is a cultural and ethical problem; we will only beat it through large-scale solidarity and compassion for all workers.
U.Va. religion professor Charles Mathewes has one of the most fertile minds I've ever encountered. He seems to have read everything, and he unfailingly has a well-thought-out take on it. Now you don't just have to hope you run into Chuck in line at one of Charlottesville, Virginia's coffee shops (I think he hits each one of them daily) to get those takes on politics, academia, and religion, because Chuck has been writing a blog for the past few months. He calls it "We Are the Times," which is from one of Augustine's sermons and captures Chuck's outlook really well. (It captures a lot of mine, too, because I learned it by watching him.) Here's Augustine:
Bad times! Troublesome times! This men are saying. Let our lives be good; and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the times.
If you liked what you read in this newsletter, please encourage others to subscribe. And thank you for reading!
Jon