Theophilus North Read Free

its best, Theophilus North reads like one of those exuberant letters to his classmate and mother back in 1922. It may sometimes seem to pile on, but mostly it brims with delight, wit, prodigious learning, voice, bon mots, epigrams, apothegms, aperçus, grace, and yes, what a lot of lovely girls are in it. It may now be our winter of 2003, but in these pages it is still and forever the golden, enchanted summer of ’26.
    â€”Christopher Buckley
    Blue Hill, Maine         

The Nine Ambitions
    In the spring of 1926 I resigned from my job.
    The first days following such a decision are like the release from a hospital after a protracted illness. One slowly learns how to walk again; slowly and wonderingly one raises one’s head.
    I was in the best of health, but I was innerly exhausted. I had been teaching for four and a half years in a boys’ preparatory school in New Jersey and tutoring three summers at a camp connected with the school. I was to all appearance cheerful and dutiful, but within I was cynical and almost totally bereft of sympathy for any other human being except the members of my family. I was twenty-nine years old, about to turn thirty. I had saved two thousand dollars—set aside, not to be touched—for either a return to Europe (I had spent a year in Italy and France in 1920-1921) or for my expenses as a graduate student in some university. It was not clear to me what I wanted to do in life. I did not want to teach, though I knew I had a talent for it; the teaching profession is often a safety-net for just such indeterminate natures. I did not want to be a writer in the sense of one who earns his living by his pen; I wanted to be far more immersed in life than that. If I were to do any so-called “writing,” it would not be before I had reached the age of fifty. If I were destined to die before that, I wanted to be sure that I had encompassed as varied a range of experience as I could—that I had not narrowed my focus to that noble but largely sedentary pursuit that is covered by the word “art.”
    Professions. Life careers. It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy’s and girl’s imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of the imagination.
    At various times I had been afire with N INE L IFE A MBITIONS —not necessarily successive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes dropped and later revived, sometimes very lively but under a different form and only recognized, with astonishment, after the events which had invoked them from the submerged depths of consciousness.
    The F IRST, the earliest, made its appearance during my twelfth to my fourteenth years. I record it with shame. I resolved to become a saint. I saw myself as a missionary among primitive peoples. I had never met a saint but I had read and heard a great deal about them. I was attending a school in North China and the parents of all my fellow-students (and my teachers in their way) were missionaries. My first shock came when I became aware that (perhaps covertly) they regarded the Chinese as a primitive people. I knew better than that. But I clung to the notion that I would be a missionary to a really primitive tribe. I would lead an exemplary life and perhaps rise to the crown of martyrdom. Gradually during the next ten years I became aware of the obstacles in my path. All I knew about sainthood was that the candidate must be totally absorbed in a relationship with God, in pleasing Him, and in serving His creatures here on earth. Unfortunately I had ceased to believe in the existence of God in 1914 (my seventeenth year), my view of the intrinsic divinity in my fellow-men (and in myself) had deteriorated, and I knew that I was incapable of meeting the strictest demands of selflessness, truthfulness, and