Dear Mr. Brooks

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.I answered his request in his column, “The Life Report.” I am quoting from his opening remarks.

“If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories — career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge –and give yourself a grade in each area.

” If you send these life reports to me at dabrooks@nytimes.com, I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

“I ask for this gift for two reasons.

“First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete pciture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

“More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relativelty little help in undersanding how a life devbelops, how careers and familes ev olve, what are are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.”

Dear Mr. Brooks:

I was a teacher for thirty-two years.It was the equivalent of having urine running down your leg. In this culture teaching, as presently constituted, is a significant agent of conditioning the young, making them dupes for the American dream, whatever that is. If you don’t know, it is marketing.

Since the Conant Report in 1957 about our secondary school system reported on its gross deficiencies, some decades later nothing really has significantly changed.

Was I a good teacher, which is sufficient in any case, or just a cranky discontent? I was one of the best. I lived a devastating split. It took the awakening of intelligence; Krishnamurti called it that, for me to realize that I was like Dathan on the way to Mt. Sinai, hectoring Moses to return to Egypt. No wonder it took forty years for that generation to die out so that metaphorically an unenslaved Jewish mentality could enter Canaan.

I trained to be a psychotherapist, so that I could come to my death knowing that I could be something other than an American teacher. It is not the occupation that is dreadful; it is the reality of it. So I wasted a third of my life a surly discontent in a mind-numbing occupation where to be excellent threatened the lives of others.I once told a group of parents that I was a writer who happened to be a teacher and because of that I could help their children in ways that an English teacher could not. On the morrow a guidance counselor tried to reprimand me for that “provocative” statement, for the tax-paying parents wanted me to be a teacher who happened to be a writer.

I have always been subversive, often surreptitiously. Call it passive-aggressive if the diagnosis helps you.And what a split that is. Allow me to brag: I see through crap, I see through large swaths of this rather decadent culture –just look at the array of pinheads running as Republicans. The fact that, except for one, they all believe in creationism attests to the failure of the school system in this country. Nothing wrong in being in decline, a natural historical process for empires. Just see it.

As a therapist I grew immeasurably so. I worked with clients to decondition themselves and finally to be free of me. I don’t brew disciples. Working with a school-phobic teenager, the school pressured the mother because they had not seen any results. They told her I was not a good therapist. Get this – school teachers commenting with their amazing erudition and expertise about another professional in an entirely different career. Aside: if more teachers went into treatment before becoming “educators,” we would see better teaching. Better still, if they went into treatment they might realize teaching is not the way to behave maturely

In short, I urged the mother to stand fast. I told her I was not an agent of the school system. It was not my task to make her son be good, nice, conform and all the delightful ways that schools want the herd to behave. Years later I met the now adult man who was my client. He was at college and all was well. He won. The school was defeated. Yippee!

All my life I have written. It kept me emotionally alive all during those dread years as a teacher. I have written three books, all favorably reviewed, not bad for someone in the last decades of his life. I will never play golf!

All this is career information, is it not? But there is more to every one of us. I have been reading and learning from that great spiritual genius, Krishnamurti, for more than three decades. Between him and Kazantzakis I almost have it down. The Freese motto is an epitaph from Kazantzakis’s: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” I am not dependent on either man. I just catch their rays for a good mental tan.

Teacher, shrink, writer, and all this does not assuage the griefs I have experienced in my life. A daughter who committed suicide because I was an inept and often not understanding father who lived far away. Closure is a moronic American cliché. It never closes. I don’t bathe in retrospective guilt. I just have regrets I did not see more deeply as a father into her pain. I lost a wife in a car accident and a daughter who was terribly mangled but survived, her boyfriend dying in the crash. I remember all this and I can do no more than to be a living sconce for each, for if I remember them they are “alive.”

This society considers me superannuated.In response, I just don’t consider this society. Krishnamurti said that all societies are essentially corrupt. I would tell anyone reading this essay that is all an aware human being needs to know. The rest is his or her struggle.