Unlike a School of Foreign Service junior politico or a pre-med science prodigy, I came to college armed only with the vague notion that I liked “the humanities.” I was sure it would all sort itself out my first year in some life-changing class, when a meaningful comment from a professor would illuminate my entire future. Needless to say that didn’t happen, and I increasingly grew panicked over the summer as I listened to my high school friends explain how their impressive internships fit exactly into their five-year plans. To hear them tell it, one more summer spent lifeguarding at the local pool and I could expect to spend the rest of my life unemployed.
While I had to deal with this collegiate monkey on my back in my own way, my parents were now confronted with the prospect of a fifth child majoring in the liberal arts at an expensive school. Ten years ago they had declared my older brother Sean’s classical studies major, “so interesting,” and Andrew’s history major was “deeply important.” It wasn’t until Maura’s choice of English (which happened to be around the time of Sean’s graduation and subsequent unemployment) that the bloom wore off the rose. My parents now started to use adjectives like “self-indulgent” and “impractical” to describe the humanities. They stopped talking reverently about pursuing intellectual passions and started referring to college as a “really pricey book club.” My dad kept asking me if I missed taking science courses and dropped hints about how much he’d love free medical advice in his impending golden years. My mom told me she wished she’d done math flashcards with us as children instead of reading us so many damn books.
My parents seemed to have forgotten that for all their protests against our desultory life plans, they were liberal arts majors, too. They were guilty of passing on their tastes to us through books, music and art.
My mother has a beautiful coffee-table book called 100 Flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe. As a child, I would stare at its pages for hours, drawn to the vibrant colors and the explosively unique depictions of such familiar subjects. Years later, I was surprised to discover that O’Keeffe had not merely painted flowers, but had also done a series of modernist landscapes. I initially hated them, but with time I came appreciateion. Now my favorite painting is a non-botanical O’Keeffe called “Sky Above the Clouds,” a golden-tinged blue and white stylized painting of the lovely world that exists for us only from the window of an airplane.
I have a poster of it hanging in my room this year on the wall opposite from my bed, and it always seems to catch my eye. It’s a perfect example of perspective, with large clouds in the foreground diminishing into smaller ones, all directed toward a vanishing point on the horizon.
Every time I see it I remember learning about perspective in fourth grade art class when we all had to paint a road. The teacher instructed us to “start big and go small towards the vanishing point.”
Starting big and going small seems like a pretty apt metaphor for my life. I went from wanting to be a professional blackjack dealer at the tender age of six to shooting for either the Pulitzer Prize or the Major Leagues at 10. I finally settled on gourmet French chef at 12. Now I’m expected to narrow all that down into a one or two-word major? Every time I glanced at “Sky Above the Clouds,” I would start to think about my parents hope that I would choose a “practical” major and settle on a well-defined career path, and it got pretty depressing. Visions of molecules and formulas were dancing in my head.
Then one day I realized that the clouds in the front of the painting were not just larger, but far more detailed and beautiful than those near the horizon. They, not the distant ones, were the full realization of O’Keeffe’s vision. I don’t think she would have followed my art teacher’s rules. I like to think she would have been a liberal arts major, and an undecided sophomore at that.
