Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
"Now I Become Myself"
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA

journey, a descent that hit bottom in the struggle with clinical
depression that I will write about later in this book. But
whether that is the case or not, the moment was large with
things I needed to learn -- and could learn only by going into
the dark.

In that moment, all the false bravado about why I had left
academic life collapsed around me, and I was left with noth-
ing more than the reality of my own fear. I had insisted, to
myself as well as others, that I wanted out of the university
because it was unfit for human habitation. It was, I argued, a
place of corruption and arrogance, filled with intellectuals
who evaded their social responsibilities and yet claimed supe-
riority over ordinary folks -- the very folks whose lack of power
and privilege compelled them to shoulder the responsibilities
that kept our society intact.

If those complaints sound unoriginal, it is only because
they are. They were the accepted pieties of Berkeley in the
sixties, which -- for reasons I now understand -- I eagerly
embraced as my own. Whatever half-truths about the univer-
sity my complaints may have contained, they served me pri-
marily as a misleading and self-serving explanation of why I
fled academic life.

The truth is that I fled because I was afraid -- afraid that I
could never succeed as a scholar, afraid that I could never
measure up to the university's standards for research and pub-
lication. And I was right -- though it took many years before I

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

26

Next>

<Previous