An Underachiever's Diary by Benjamin Anastas

Author:Benjamin Anastas [Anastas, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-967-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1998-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

III. Adulthood for Beginners

hen I undertook this diary I made a promise not to form my recollections into something easily digested, some cloying testimonial to my resilience in the face of small adversities, or a bildungsroman bittersweet with life, love, and heartbreak, or even a confession in the religious sense, my paltry imitation of a young St. Augustine wrestling with his conversion and the meaning of his faith. Like the onetime logician from Hippo I have stolen pears and wasted them, sat under fig trees and heard things spoken in the air, and still I am uncertain about God’s existence. Belief, after all, is impossible for an under-achiever. Augustine enjoyed long years as a skeptic, arguing with the Manicheans in Carthage, indulging Alypius in his trips to the Coliseum in Rome—his pseudoscientific treatise Beauty and Proportion, which sought to measure, in units, the source of physical attraction, is the underachiever’s model text, especially since he lost the completed manuscript. If Augustine had stopped there, unfulfilled and bitter, Christianity might well have been completely different. This is idle speculation, of course, but without a reliable figment of His face just overhead, what else is there? Conspiracy theories, rumors, and entertaining myths on television, countless little diaries far more lurid than this. My fondest wish, then, would be for my diary to end up in the hands of someone in better circumstances than my own, the mature Augustine with his letters already in wide circulation, a happy celebrity or wildly successful businessman, just so they might remember what it was like before God’s lightning struck and the very air, the paparazzi and all the number-crunching minions shouted their names out loud for everyone to hear.

I am a humble man with despotic tendencies. I am a saint with the lifestyle of a sinner, or do I mean the opposite, a sinner who has unrequited, saintlike aspirations, no, wait—as you can see, I am still in the thick of it. Please, do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose, designed to exorcize my demons and provide a thrill for everyone who cares to watch them all take flight, Look, he’s telling secrets; I am no different now, more than halfway through these mostly happy recollections, than I was the moment I began to write them down. I am not lounging on an offshore island with my profits, nor am I, for that matter, serving time in prison. I am an ordinary man. If you want to locate me in time and space, good luck. My address is unknown, my phone number unlisted. My family knows where I am, of course, but they’ve been given explicit instructions not to reveal my whereabouts to ex-friends, ex-girlfriends, creditors, missionaries, secret admirers, law-enforcement agencies, the IRS, and, last but not least, hypothetical readers of this document.

It is purely for pedagogical purposes that I include my college years in the “adulthood” section of my diary. Strictly speaking, I was still an adolescent when I

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