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THESIS

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Learning Through Autobiography: The Crisis of
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LEARNING THROUGH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE CRISIS OF FAITH,
HEALTH, AND VOCATION IN THE EXPERIENCE OF
AMERICAN WRITERS
By

Warren Davis Berryman

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Educational Administration

2002

ABSTRACT
LEARNING THROUGH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE CRISIS OF FAITH,
HEALTH, AND VOCATION IN THE EXPERIENCE OF
AMERICAN WRITERS
By

Warren Davis Berryman

This is a study of the relationship between autobiography and self-directed
learning. Autobiography, as “self life-writing,” is an endeavor to create retrospective text
in which the author and the Object of study are one and the same. Self-directed learning is
an endeavor to understand both what motivates a person to learn and how it is he or She
undertakes the learning process. The two are interrelated.

Six autobiographies form the core of this study. An author who both reﬂects upon
and interrogates past experience wrote each autobiography. These reﬂections and
interrogations were then brought together in the form of a written text. The books I used
can be categorized as follows. Two deal with learning that transpired through
participation in a religious pilgrimage. These are Virgin Time: In Search of the
Contemplmve Life by Patricia Hampl and The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to
Jerusalem by Samuel Heilman. Two deal with learning that transpired through the
experience of illness. These are An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by
Kay Redﬁeld Jamison and A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing by Reynolds
Price. Two deal with the learning that transpired through the experience of career change.
These are The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found by Don Snyder and

A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned by Jane Tompkins.

The results of this study highlight the importance Of autobiographical learning to
the ﬁeld of adult education over the course of a life. Each author extracted a story from
his or her particular situation. It was a story that helped them understand the past in light
of the present in order to live for the future. Through the process Of writing and learning,
the authors experienced a transformation that left them different persons. Each author

changed his or her world to word in order to act upon it.

Copyright by
WARREN DAVIS BERRYMAN
2002

To my wife, Terryl,

With deepest love and gratitude

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all those who took an active part in the creation of this

dissertation.

Dr. Daniel Taylor for writing The Healing Power of Stories. You set me on my
way.

Dr. John Lillis and Dr. Maxine Margesson for your encouragement and help
throughout the years. This would never have happened were it not for your
faithful “behind-the-scenes” support.

Dr. Steve Johnson. Your friendship and support through the years will always be
cherished. Thank you for your comments and for helping me to understand many
things.

Dr. David Landrum. Thank you for your comments and help.

Pastor Dan Mead. Dan, you helped me start on this years ago. I hope you know
this.

To my dissertation committee members, Dr. Marilyn Amey, Dr. John Dirkx, and
Dr. Joyce Ladenson, for your help, support, and comments.

I would also like to recognize family members and Show them what they have

done and invite them to ﬁnd themselves within these pages.

Mom and Dad, your presence underlies all of this. How often I reﬂect upon
summers at Lytle Shores and the Rockies, while simultaneously hearing Bach’s
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor emanating from the Church of the Heavenly Rest

playing in the background. It doesn’t get much better than that.

vi

0 Anne and Emmett, you both are in here too. Every conversation we have takes
me in new directions and frees me from some constricting thought pattern. The
soul cannot ﬂourish if the mind is stuck.

0 B00 and Hodge, you too are a part Of this. Whether it was watching the sun set at
the lake house or listening to the “sounds of silence” at Labrador, your inﬂuence
has been felt in many ways.

0 Jessica, Johanna, Jeanna, and Jefferson, you are my motivation. This will
undoubtedly make a little more sense as you get older. For the time being, let me
at least say that meaning and understanding begin at home, and you all helped me
see this . . . at long last.

And last, but far from least, Dr. Steve Weiland, my advisor and in many respects
my spiritual director. Steve, you have been to me what Donnie was to Patricia Hampl and
Menachem Reichler was to Samuel Heilman . . . one who could guide without
prescribing, one who could suggest without mandating, and one who helped me
understand that experience does indeed precede language. Thanks for believing in me.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden always has been one of my favorites. On many
occasions I have wondered where I might use the dedicatory remarks that Steinbeck
made to Pascal Covici at the front of the novel. Now I know. You remember he said:

Dear Pat,

You came upon me carving some kind of little ﬁgure out of wood and you
said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”

I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”

“What for?”

“To put things in.”

“What things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.

vii

Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full.
Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thought and good
thought—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of
creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
John

Well, Steve, here’s your box. And still . . . it is not full.

viii

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . . .
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. . . .
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the ﬁrst time.
(Eliot, 1970, pp. 207-208)

ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1
Background of This Study .......................................................................................... 1
Overview of This Study .............................................................................................. 1
Why Autobiography? .................................................................................................. 4
Self-Directed Learning: Some Limitations ................................................................. 9
Method ...................................................................................................................... 11

CHAPTER 1

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELF -DIRECTED LEARNING ........................................... 13
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 13
Autobiography .......................................................................................................... l4

. . . As Narrative Psychology ............................................................................. l4
. . . As Linguistic Construction of the Self ......................................................... 21
. . . As a Means of Adult Learning and Transformation .................................... 32
Self-Directed Learning .............................................................................................. 38
. . . As a Set of Goals .......................................................................................... 4O
. . . As a Learning Process .................................................................................. 42
. . . As a Personal Attribute or Experience ......................................................... 45

CHAPTER 2

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF RELIGIOUS PILGRIMAGE .......... 49
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 49
Patricia Hampl: Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life ......................... 51

Faith or Learning by Remembering .................................................................. 51
Miracles or Learning, Meaning, and Connecting .............................................. 58
Silence or Appropriation ................................................................................... 62
Samuel Heilman: The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem ............... 67
Learning and Time ............................................................................................. 67
The Roles of Learning and Lernen .................................................................... 74
Learning Through Appropriation ....................................................................... 81
Summary ................................................................................................................... 83

CHAPTER 3

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF ILLNESS ......................................... 89
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 89
Kay Redﬁeld Jamison: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness ....... 90

Preparation for Learning or a Story Must Be Told ............................................ 90
Learning Through Change ................................................................................. 94
Learning Through Love and Acceptance ........................................................... 96
Learning Self-Acceptance, or This Is Who I Am ............................................ 100
Reynolds Price: A Whole New Life: An Illness and 9 Healing .............................. 103

 

Lifelong Learning and the Role of Exceptional Human Experience ............... 103

 

 

Learning Through Reﬂection and Friends ....................................................... 109
Learning That Transforms Life ........................................................................ 112
Summary ................................................................................................................. 117

CHAPTER 4

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF CAREER TRANSITION .............. 120
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 120
Don Snyder: The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and af Life Found .............. 120

Learning Begins With a Disorienting Dilemma .............................................. 120
Learning Through Literature ............................................................................ 125
The Journey Home, or Putting It All Together ................................................ 130
Jane Tompkins: A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned ............................... 136
The Role of Experience in Learning ................................................................ 136
Love and Acceptance Are Missing .................................................................. 139
Language as a Means of Justifying Self-Existence .......................................... 143
Language as a Mechanism to Establish Meaning and Understanding ............. 148
Summary ................................................................................................................. 157

CHAPTER 5

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING:

SOME CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................. 161
Self-Construction and the Revelatory Power of Language ..................................... 161
Common Themes .................................................................................................... 165

Agency and Communion ................................................................................. 166

Active Engagement and Narrative Creation .................................................... 168

Location and Relation ...................................................................................... 173
Autobiography and Self-Directed Learning . . . Observations and Classroom

Implications ...................................................................................................... 176

Autobiography and Self-Directed Learning . . . Expanding the Horizon ............... 179

APPENDIX ...................................................................................................................... 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 187

xi

INTRODUCTION

Bacground of This Study

Several books have had a profound inﬂuence on my thinking in recent years:
Gardner’s (1998) Extraordinary Minds, Taylor’s (1996) The Healing Power of Stories,
McAdams’(1993) The Stories We Live By. Gosse’s (1958) Father and Son: A Study of
Two Temperaments, Ackerley’s (1968) My Father and Myself, and Merton’s m
Story Mountain. As I read through these books, it appeared that signiﬁcant learning took
place in the lives of some people as they reﬂected on their pasts and attempted to weave a
story from signiﬁcant events and relationships. Although they were never referred to as
learning per se, or undertaken in an attempt to satisfy speciﬁc learning objectives, these
autobiographies and stories still accomplished a larger purpose, that being one of learning
from and through life experience. As a result of my experience with these authors’ works,
I became intrigued by a larger question related to learning that takes place from and

through the textual creation of autobiography.

Overview of This Study

This research was a joint study of self-directed learning and autobiography. I
looked at autobiography as a self-directed means of learning from and through life
experience. In this study, I interacted with six authors in order to look into the ways in
which they learned from the experiences they encountered and how this learning both
redirected the course of their lives and helped redeﬁne who they were.

What united these authors was the individual texts they created. Each
autobiography was an undertaking by the author to create a story from his or her unique

situation (Gornick, 2001b). Each story in turn was a story about learning. As such, it

vividly and imaginatively expressed details about the author’s own experience and the
learning that resulted. In each case, the autobiography was the “research text” with which
I interacted.

What makes the genre of the autobiography unique is the fact that, not only is it
(the autobiography) the report of a life lived, but it also is the reconstruction of a life
story. “True memoir (autobiography) is written, like all literature, in an attempt to ﬁnd
not only a self but a world” (Hampl, 1999, p. 35). This “discovery” process is both
reﬂexive and dialogic (Cohler, 2000), is creative by nature, and calls for the use of one’s
imagination (Freeman, 1993). In addition it is reﬂective and self—directed, and when done
well it results in a work Of art.

A life is a work of art, probably the greatest one we produce. It is not simply art in

the living. For we do not live our lives in any naked sense, save when we are

caught aback and leave our faces behind. Rather, the art is in the telling—the
telling after the fact to ourselves and others. But it is not a ﬁction, life, nor is it,
for that matter, the real thing. It is some amalgam of the two—both theater and

what theater’s about. (Brunet, 1999, p.7)

What method is available to the researcher to investigate the personal experience
and truly look at and understand the “experience-in-itselt”? The answer to this question
for Clandinin and Connelly (1994), as well as the six authors I selected, was the creation
of a story. For these people, experience became the stories they lived and told. It was in
the telling of their stories that they afﬁnned them, modiﬁed them, and created new ones.
AS Freeman (2000) said, the “storying” process is a rewriting of the individual self.

It is also worth noting that the ability to describe and portray the life experiences
that constitute each autobiography may be as critical to this research project as the actual

life experiences themselves. It is to this phenomenon that Bruner (1995) referred when he

wrote,

The “rightness” of any autobiographical version is relative to the intentions and
conventions that govern its construction or its interpretation. . . .Though it may
seem a strange way to put it, we may properly suspect that the shape of a life as
experienced is as much dependent upon the narrative skills of the autobiographer
as is the story he or she tells about it. It is probably in this sense that Henry James
intended his famous remark that adventures happen only to people who know how

to tell them. (p.163)

Life experience, memory, and language are the tools available for this
autobiographical construction of the life story. "Lived experiences gather hermeneutic
signiﬁcance as we [reﬂectively] gather them by giving memory to them. Through
meditations, conversations, day dreams, inspirations and other interpretive acts we assign
meaning to the phenomena of lived life" (VanManen, 1990, p. 37). Stories, an
interpretive act, are a signiﬁcant way people construct and express meaning (McAdams,
1993; Mishler, 1986: Taylor, 1996). Throughout recorded history, people have made
sense of their experience by telling stories Of that experience. There is little doubt that
“retrospective accounts are both records and interpretations of experience” (Weiland,
1998, p.16).

McAdamS (1996) said one of the primary concerns of this postmodern era is self-
identity. Individuals today are confused about the self, what it is, and Speciﬁcally how to
construct it. Regarding this self-construction, he asked, “What form does such a
construction take? A growing number of theorists believe that the only conceivable form
for a uniﬁed and purposeful telling of an individual life is the story” (p. 306).

Ricoeur (1991) shed further light on the subject of narrative when he claimed that
language is essentially the tying together of three worlds—that of the word, that of the
sentence, and that of the text wherein the word and the sentence are situated. Through the

use Of words and sentences, an individual can create a text, a story of sorts, in an effort to

draw together and clarify personal experience(s).

Abascal-Hildebrand (1999) believed that explanation relates to understanding
through the means of narrative. Or equivalently, description and understanding ﬁnd
themselves related through the structure of narrative. Individual lives are sets of actions
that a person attempts to describe and understand. Narrative is the channel through which
the individual seeks to describe and understand these actions, as well as to discover the
meaning inherent in these actions.

Therefore, explanation (description) and understanding (prescription) together

constitute the ground for our becoming aware of who we are as persons, how we

relate our actions as persons to others, and how we project ourselves as the

persons we would want to be. (p. 9)

Why Autobiography?

Throughout this study, I use the term autobiography to mean some combination
of the terms self: life, and writing. Inherent in this deﬁnition is the idea of story and
personal narrative. Autobiography, in this sense, is not the recounting of persons, places,
things, or ideas in the form of journal entries. Rather, it is the weaving together of these
elements in the form of a unique narrative or story. As Taylor (1996) wrote, “A story is
the telling of the signiﬁcant actions of characters over time” (p. 15). In this sense,
autobiography becomes an author’s writing of his or her story, a story that includes
signiﬁcant actions, thoughts, and feelings.

VanManen (1990) identiﬁed seven characteristics of story. He maintained that the
signiﬁcance of story for human science is that:

1. story provides us with possible human experiences;

2. story enables us to experience life situations, feelings, emotions, and events

that we would not normally experience;

3. story allows us to broaden the horizons Of our normal existential landscape by

creating possible worlds;

4. story tends to appeal to us and involve us in a personal way;

5. story is an artistic device that lets us turn back to life as lived, whether ﬁctional
or real;

6. story evokes the quality of vividness in detailing unique and particular aspects

of a life that could be my life or your life;

7. and yet, great novels or stories transcend the particularity of their plots and

protagonists, etc., which makes them subject to thematic analysis and
criticism. (p. 71)

But autobiography is more than a story. In fact, it is distinct from a story and may
very well consist of numerous stories. The ﬁction writer has a story to tell. By
comparison, the “memoirists (autobiographers) wish to tell their mind, not their story”
(Hampl, 1999, p. 18). Embedded in this statement is the idea that for the autobiographer
there is a whole world of idea, sensation, thought, and meaning that extends above and
beyond the actual telling of the story.

The very act of writing is as important as the end product—the written piece.
Writing is a form of “thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning”
(Morrison, 1987, p. 1 11). But it also carries with it a sense of “awe and reverence and
mystery and magic” (p. l 1 1). It is a sort of literary archeology in which the author
attempts to reconstruct a memory ediﬁce using some memory and some imagination as
his or her tools (p. 112). In a sense it is a form of ﬁction, due to the nature of the
imaginative act. But it is also a form of truth in that recollection is used to help
reconstruct events, relationships, and feelings that really happened.

Gomick (2001b) gave emphasis to this “form of truth” that Morrison ascribed to
the autobiography as she looked at the relationship between the situation and the story.
She said,

Truth in a memoir [autobiography] is achieved not through a recital of actual

events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working

hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the memoirist is
not what matters; it matters only what the memoirist makes of what happened.

(p. viii)

Bruner (1995) shed further light on the nature of truth in the autobiography when he
wrote,

A memoir [autobiography] is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an

idea Of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will

shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir

[autobiography] is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved

when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with

the experience at hand. (p. 91)

In addition to the autobiography being both constructive and imaginative in its
process (Morrison, 1987), as well as truthful and believable (Gomick, 2001b), it is also
an instrument that can be used to both discover and deﬁne the self in prose. Gomick
clariﬁed this by saying,

Inevitably, it is a story of self-discovery and self-deﬁnition. The subject of

autobiography is always self-deﬁnition. That is, deﬁnition out in the world, not in

the void. The memoirist [autobiographer], like the poet and the novelist, must
engage with the world because engagement makes experience, experience makes
wisdom, and ﬁnally it’s the wisdom that counts. Every writer has to persuade the
reader that he or she knows something and is writing as honestly as possible to

arrive at what that something is. (p. viii-ix)

When writing autobiography, the author fulﬁlls two roles simultaneously. These
are the roles of observer and participant, or equivalently subject and Object. By
reconstructing situations and relationships, the author is able to emphasize the tension
between self and others, between self and environment, and most important, between self
and self. When all is said and done and the autobiography has drawn to a close, the reader
is left with the feeling that a successful “blending” of observer-participant, or subject-
object, has occurred, and that the self in all its myriad representations is truly whole and
united.

In addition, an element Of explanation and recounting characterizes an

autobiography. Gomick (2001b) said, “It isn’t enough just to live a life; we must be

continually explaining it to ourselves, sorting, remembering, casting out the less

6

important stuff, interpreting, sometimes justifying ourselves to ourselves” (p. 2).
Chandler (as cited in McDonnell, 1998), added further clarity with the comment, “Every
autobiography is a story of crisis, in that it recounts change, turning points, conversions,
critical lettings-go and breaks with the past” (p. 12).

This “explanation and recounting” is constructed and passed on to the reader
through the use of language. Words and their meanings are used to build the ediﬁce and
the structure. Bruner (1990) claimed,

There is something curious about autobiography. It is an account given by a

narrator in the here and now about a protagonist bearing his name who existed in

the there and then, the story terminating in the present when the protagonist fuses

with the narrator. (p. 121)

Eakin (1989) ﬁthher illuminated the importance of language and its use in the
process of self-disclosure. He stated,

The true reference of story in autobiography is not to some comparatively remote

period in the subject’s past but rather to the unfolding in language Of the

autobiographical act itself. In this sense story in autobiography functions as a

metaphor for discourse. (p. xiii)

Some authors writing on the subject of autobiography have attempted to
differentiate between autobiography and memoir. Zinsser (1994), for example, deﬁned
the terms in the following manner.

What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike

autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores

most of it. . . . Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very

much like a photograph in its selective composition. (p. 99)

The deﬁnitions of autobiography contain certain key elements. All seem to agree
that autobiography is imaginative, an act of creation, generated by and through the use of
language, and used as a window through which to view a life under consideration. Hampl

(1999) claimed that the job of the autobiography is one Of “seeking the congruence

between stored image and hidden emotion” (p. 30). Goodwin (1993) said, “An
7

autobiography represents the writer’s effort, made at a certain stage of life, to portray the
meaning of personal experience as it has developed over the course Of a signiﬁcant period
of time or from the distance of that signiﬁcant time period” (p. 11). The very act of
telling does not relate experience in an objective manner as much as it re/interprets it, and
creates it in the present moment.

As a process, autobiography transforms experience into meaningful narrative
(Olney, 1980). It is a process of dealing with self-identity and possible changes or
transformations in self-perception. Ultimately it asks, “Who am I?” and compares the
response to preconceived notions of what the author thought the response might be, as
well as to preconceived notions of how the author might have answered the question
historically. Brunet (1987) claimed that,

eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the

self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience,

to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very “events” of a life. In
the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our

lives. (p. 15)

The learning process and the autobiographical process are both creative endeavors
(Brady, 1990; Bruner, 1995; Kearney, 1988; Nelson, 1994). Brady said of the process,

It is the act of a creator to construct and give meaning to experience, one’s own

mythic tale. . . . Through imagination, the autobiographer creates the past by

infusing facts and events with interpretation, direction, suggestiveness, and

ultimately, human meaning. (p. 49)

Autobiography calls for both critical reﬂection (Brookﬁeld, 1987; Jarvis, 1992;
Knowles, 1980; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991) and self-directed learning strategies
(Cranton, 1994; Knowles, 1975; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991). It is an interpretive
process (Bruner, 1995; Freeman, 1993; McAdams, 1993) that results in change and

transformation (Brady, 1990; Mezirow, 1981, 1985, 1990a, 1990b, 1991; Nelson, 1994;

Van Manen, 1990).

The result of all that transpires during the course of this autobiographical process
(Bruner, 1995) is learning. “Learning is a process by which human beings attempt to
make meaning” (Brady, 1990, p. 43). In turn, Mezirow (1995, 1991) claimed that all
meaning is based on interpretation. TO make meaning is to construe or interpret
experience, and the critical dimension of adult learning is reﬂection, or the process of
validating ideas and assumptions based on prior learning. Merizow (1995) deﬁned
learning as "the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or a revised
interpretation of the meaning of one’s experience in order to guide future action" (p. 49).
In this context, he said that the word action is broadly used to include making a decision,
revising a point of view, posing a problem, reframing a structure of meaning, or changing

a behavior.

Self-Directed Learning: Some Limitations

Over the past decade, a vast amount of research has been conducted in the areas
of self-directed learning and transforrnative learning (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999). Such
research, however, continues to be framed within what Dirkx (1997) termed a “technical-
rational view of knowledge” (p. 79), or what Nelson (1994) called a “rational cognitive
process” (p. 397). In addition, researchers have tended to focus on the instrumental
nature of learning whereby the learner is often forced into a sort of “survival” mode in
order to adapt to the changing constraints of his or her environment. Much of the learning
that transpires is the result of Objectives established by the learner to go out and learn
M something—an illness, a skill, a hobby, and so on.

But this is not the whole story. Much of the learning that transpires is the result of

learning from or throng] something—a trip, a relationship, an illness, and SO on. What

 

makes this research somewhat problematic is that it is difﬁcult to measure such learning,

9

it is difﬁcult to reproduce it, and it is next to impossible to legislate or explain it in any
way. Often the best one can do is struggle to describe it. The purpose of my study was to
take this struggle a step further and look at the way learning occurred in the lives of six
people who re-created and shared their individual experiences through the avenue of an
autobiography.

Through self-directed processes, these authors came to view both themselves and
their relation to the world in new and different ways. By fully engaging their respective
experiences, they emerged as new, different, and signiﬁcantly better adapted individuals.
Individual situations give rise to unique stories. And these are stories that reﬂect the
existence of signiﬁcant learning and growth in understanding. As a result, the question I
struggled with throughout this study was the following: “What learning takes place from
and through the textual creation of an autobiography?”

Perhaps best of all, Brunet (1995) placed this study in perspective when he said,

I have no grand conclusion to Offer save that autobiography is life construction

through “text” construction. To look at a life as if it were independent of the

autobiographical text that constructs it is as futile a quest for reality as the
physicist’s search for a Nature that is independent of the theories that lead him to

measure this rather than that phenomenon. (p. 176)

The creation of personal narrative in the form Of written text is the means I have
selected to look at the relationship between self-directed learning and personal narrative.
I must confess that, right from the beginning, this is a relationship that appears to be
somewhat problematic. Self-directed learning is concerned with “studying about” an
individual or a process (Brookﬁeld, 1985, 1986; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, 1999;
Mezirow, 1981, 1985, 1990a, 1990b, 1991.), whereas personal narrative is concerned with
the “creation of” a self (Conway, 1998; Eakin, 1999; Gomick, 2001a, 2001b; Hampl,

” 6‘

1999; Taylor, 1996). Self-directed learning is concerned with “schemes, perspectives,”

10

and “points of view” (Mezirow, 1981, 1985, 1990a, 1990b, 1991). Personal narrative is
concerned with interpreting the self anew through the creation Of narrative, narrative
being both a process and a product of language (Conway, 1998; Freeman, 1993;

McAdams, 1993, 1999).

Mgﬂigd

Through reading and analyzing six autobiographies, I studied what and how it
was these six authors had learned from and through their various experiences. The books
I selected can be categorized as follows. Two deal with learning that was effected
through participation in a religious pilgrimage of sorts. These are Virgin Time: In Search
of the Contempkitive Life (Hampl, 1992) and The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimggm
Jerusalem (Heilman, 1984). Two deal with learning that was effected through the
experience of a life debilitating illness. These are An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods
and Madness (Jameson, 1995) and A Whole New Life: An Illness and 3 Healing (Price.
1%). Two deal with the learning that was effected through the experience of career
changes. These are The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found (Snyder,
1997) and A Life in School: Whgt the Teacher Learned (Tompkins, 1999b).

Three of these, Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, The Gate
Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and A Life in School: What the Teacher
Md, are memoirs of self-directed learning experiences resulting from events that the
authors initiated. Each experience was designed and planned by the author and hence was
under his or her control

The other three, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. A Whole
New Life: An Illness and 3 Healing- and The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a

Life Found are memoirs of learning experiences resulting from events that the authors

11

 

 

did not initiate. MW and A Whole New
Life: An Illness and a Healing deal with individual experiences related to illness, whereas
The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found concerns the experience of a
mid-career job loss. A brief description of each book is given in the Appendix.

The interpretative and creative process of biography calls on each individual’s
memory not only to recount the past, but also to make sense of it. Each author is
challenged to look at his or her life from afar, to enlarge the ﬁeld of vision, as it were, in
order to see and make connections, and to help tie life events together. An undertaking
such as this is an interpretive act, resulting in an enlarged understanding of each
individual self. In essence, this is what writing autobiography is all about.

This study is organized into the following chapters. Chapter 1 provides an
overview of work that has taken place in the areas of self-directed learning and
autobiography. Chapter 2 is an analysis of the learning that takes place when two authors
undertake a religious pilgrimage and return to the place of origin of their respective
religious traditions. Chapter 3 is an analysis of the learning that takes place when two
authors recount their respective experiences with debilitating disease. Chapter 4 is an
analysis of the learning that takes place when two authors recount their respective
experiences with career changes. Chapter 5 is a summary and discussion of the lessons

learned and how autobiographies are indeed stories of self-directed learning.

12

CHAPTER 1

AUTOBIOGRAPHYl AND SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING

Introduction

In this chapter I explore three broad theoretical areas related to both
autobiography and self-directed learning. The ﬁrst section, entitled, Autobiography, is
focused on three areas: (a) Autobiography . . . As Narrative Psychology, (b)
Autobiography . . . As Linguistic Construction of the Self, and (c) Autobiography . . . As
a Means of Adult Learning and Transformation. The second section entitled, Self-
Directed Learning, also is focused on three areas: (a) Self-Directed Learning . . . As a Set
of Goals, (b) Self-Directed Learning . . . As a Learning Process, and (c) Self-Directed

Learning . . . AS Personal Attribute or Experience.

 

1I acknowledge that not everyone is pleased with the ends to which today’s autobiography has
been taken. Some are raising questions pertaining to the ethical treatment of the life story (Eakin, 1999).
Others are asking questions regarding its legitimacy as an art form (Gass, 1994), and still others are asking
questions related to how much self-disclosure is enough (Crossen, 1997; Jefferson, 1997; Staples, 1997).
According to Gass (1994), the autobiography used to be a legitimate form of self-expression,
something of value, a means Of passing on to others and later generations something learned, something of
meaning and value. Over the course of time, things of value have become more trivialized, the sacred has
become ordinary, and we have entered an era that Gass characterized as a time of “extraordinary drama of
lied-about ordinary life” (p. 51).
Gass (1994) maintained that the author of a memoir faces a dilemma. Essentially, who is talking in
an autobiography?
In an autobiography, the self divides not severally into a recording self, an applauding self, a
guilty self, a daydreaming self, but into a shaping self: it is the consciousness of oneself as a
consciousness among all these other minds, an awareness born much later than the self it studies,
and a self whose existence was ﬁtful, intermittent, for a long time, before it was able to throw a
full beam upon the life already lived and see there a pattern, as a plowed ﬁeld seen from a plane
reveals the geometry of the tractor’s path" (p. 51).
“The-one-who—is” attempts to talk about the “the-one-who-was” from the vantage point of “the-one-who-
is.” How can this be done accurately and reliably with integrity? This is the essence of verisimilitude.
Crossen (1997) maintained that “memoirs are literature’s slipperiest slopes: They require neither
the rigor of journalism nor the imagination of ﬁction” (p. A16). Following this line of reasoning,
essentially, anyone can write an autobiography. The problem we face today is “ﬁguring out how to
examine and dramatize ourselves without forgetting to pay the same attention to the larger historical and
spiritual forces that have made us” (Jefferson, 1997, p. BI).

13

Autobiography
A vast array of material has been written on the subject of autobiography. In this
section I will touch on three broad areas of autobiographical theory. These areas are
(a) Autobiography . . . As Narrative Psychology, (b) Autobiography . . . As Linguistic
Construction of the Self, and (c) Autobiography . . . AS a Means of Adult Learning and

Transformation.

. . . As Narrative Psychology

Two strong advocates for the use of narrative in the ﬁeld of psychology were Dan
McAdams and Jerome Bruner. Both men have played signiﬁcant roles in the
development of the ﬁeld of narrative psychology, McAdams primarily from within the
field of psychology and Bruner from within the combined ﬁelds Of psychology and law.

McAdams (1993, 1996) maintained that there always has been a bit of frustration
when it comes to the study of the individual person. Historically, there has been a
struggle to provide a broad enough conceptual framework in which to place the theory
and research that have been directed toward human individuality in a cultural context. His
aim was to bring together research in the ﬁeld of personality with the growing emphasis
in the social sciences on the narrative study of individual lives.

For McAdams (1999), “I” is the actual process Of creating the self. It
accomplishes this creation by narrating the “self‘s” experience. The “me” in turn, he
viewed as the result Of this creation. The “1” corresponds to the storyteller, whereas the
“me” corresponds to the story the “I” tells. For McAdams, adulthood is the time when we
begin to construe our lives in narrative terms. Our goal is to create an internalized story
Of our self that binds together three distinct elements: our reconstructed past, our

perceived present, and our anticipated future. We do this in such a way as to imbue our

14

lives with a sense of unity and purpose. Personal identity, then, becomes the internalized
and evolving story that comes about when we invoke this selective process of integration.

McAdams (1999) began by saying that that telling stories is endemic to the
human condition. It is a way for us to deﬁne who we are and, in turn, to let others deﬁne
for us who they are. We tend to feel that if we know a person’s story, we know something
about that person.

By way of comparison, Bruner (1986) made the claim that we think about the
world and about ourselves in two very different and distinct ways. One of the ways he
called the “paradigmatic mode,” which represents thinking that is logically deduced and
uses empirically validated propositions. Its usefulness is in the explanation of cause-
effect relationships and as a mechanism to acquire objective data to substantiate
theoretical claims.

The second way we think is what Bruner called the “narrative mode.” In this
mode, we use stories to make sense of our experiences. In so doing, we create plots,
scenes, and characters to help us understand how it is that our intentions and desires get
translated into action and how these actions play out over time (McAdams, 1999, p. 480).
Whereas the paradigmatic mode seeks veriﬁcation, the narrative mode is interested in
verisimilitude or “life-likeness.” How closely does the story come to life as it really is?

Life stories as such are structured to widen the horizon of life experience, not to
limit it. They are more concerned with increasing the range of possibilities Open to us
than in limiting this range. These life stories depend as much on the point of view of the
person telling them as on the reality underlying them, i.e., their verisimilitude. As a
result, we see subject and object interconnected, the subjectivity of the storyteller

intertwined with the “actuality” of the story itself.

15

McAdams (1999) deﬁned a life story as “a symbolized account of human action
organized in time” (p. 480). These life stories can be characterized as having prototypical
components. First, each story has a setting that helps to establish a frame of meaning for
understanding the story. Second, each story has a particular narrative perspective through
which the story is viewed. This helps to frame the story, to put it in perspective, and to
conceptualize it. Third, each story has a set of characters who are endowed with intention
or will; they must be capable of acting. Finally, each story has a plot or theme of some
sort, an end toward which everything moves (McAdams, 1993, 1999). McAdams deﬁned
a life story in the following manner:

A life story is an internalized and evolving narrative of the self that incorporates

the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future. For a given

person, the life story is the narrated product of the characteristic way in which the

I arranges elements of the Me into a temporal sequence complete with setting,

scenes, characters, plots, and themes. In modernity a person “has” a life story in

the same sense that he or She has traits, goals, plans, values, and so on. All Of

these things may be appropriated into the Me as a result of the selﬁng process. . . .

The adult selﬁng process seems to seek out opportunities for integrating different

autobiographical accounts into a narrated whole, aiming to construct a Me that

exhibits a modicum Of unity, coherence, and purpose. (p. 307)

The purpose of a story is to take segments of human existence and to create from
them an integrated, whole person. This is accomplished when the individual creates a
sequence of events that are both localized in time and temporally separated from other
events, and then interprets these events in such a fashion that a meaningful, integrated
whole is created.

Autobiography is a specialized form of storytelling. Through the use of memory
and the action of recollection, it becomes “an act of imaginative storytelling” (McAdams,
1999, p. 482). In this process, events from the past are selected and reconstructed in such

a way that integration with the perceived present and the anticipated future takes place.

“A good autobiography puts a life into story from, complete with setting, characters,

16

recurring themes and images, and the self-conscious reconstruction of human time
through narrative” (McAdams, 1993, p. 32).

Individual stories differ in terms of structure (few characters and a simple plot
versus many characters and a complex plot), content (themes of agency and communion),
and images the storyteller uses to convey his or her story. Agency and communion were
key themes for McAdams. He characterized agency as encompassing themes such as
power, achievement, independence, and the expansion of the self. Similarly, he
characterized communion as encompassing themes such as love, intimacy, attachment,
social integration, and other forms of human connectedness (McAdams, 1996, 1999).
“For McAdams, agency and communion are the central thematic lines in the self-deﬁning
stories that adults construct to provide their lives with unity and purpose” (McAdams,
Hoffman, Mansﬁeld, & Day, 1996).

McAdams advocated viewing life stories in the following manner. He thought
that, “rather than viewing life stories as approximations Of an Objective but unknowable
reality, it is better to conceive of them as ever-changing constructions whose reality is
socially negotiated” (p. 492). He quoted Josselson, who called for empirically minded
psychologists to adopt more of a “narrative understanding”:

Narrative understanding is based on philosophical hermeneutics, a tradition

regnant in Europe but only recently penetrating American intellectual

consciousness. Within this epistemology, there is only the text (communicated in
language), which is itself about a text, and dialogue within and among these texts.

There is no prior place to stand to make truth claims: there are only interpretations

made from a particular historical and value-implicated stance. The “hermeneutic

circle” describes a process in which understanding requires references to all prior
understandings such that knowledge accrues in a circular, dialectical fashion. NO
knowledge can be independent of context or interpreter. The enterprise of science

then becomes conversation from which emerge consensual ideas that constitute
ways of perceiving and interpreting future texts. (McAdams, 1999, p. 491)

17

For McAdams, each life story is the result of a psychosocial construction process.
This implies that, although the life story is original to each individual constructing one, it
still exhibits its constitutive meanings within the culture in which it is constructed. These
stories, in turn, are based on empirical fact, but they are not limited to this base. There is
an element of imaginative originality in each life story. Thus, although they are based on
fact, life stories are constructed in an attempt to give life meaning and coherence; as such,
they are constructed by the individual in cooperation with others and the culture in which
he or She is located

Jerome Bruner, too, was a psychologist, but rather than investigating narrative for
its psychological healing power or as a form of therapy for patients in need, his interest
was more philosophical in nature. He was interested in the process Of autobiography,
how it is constructed, as opposed to why it is constructed. In addition, he was interested
in the concept of verisimilitude and what it is that makes an autobiographical narrative
believable.

Bruner (1995) contended that there is no such thing as a “life as lived.” His
conviction was that life is created or constructed through the act of writing about it—
autobiography. It is a way to construe experience, and as such it is a never-ending
process. For Bruner, construing is synonymous with interpreting. Consequently, the
process of construing is subject to the rules and boundaries that exist for the process Of
interpretation. “Like all forms of interpretation, life construal is subject to our intentions,
to the interpretive conventions available to us and to the meanings imposed upon us by
the usages of our culture and language” (Bruner, 1995, p. 161).

One of Bruner’s greater fears was that autobiography might become “self-

sealing,” cut Off from the world and experience, in a sense frozen in time. The role of the

18

therapist, he maintained, is to awaken the patient from his or her “frozen narrative,” and
by so doing, give the individual the power to move on.

“True autobiography,” much like a “life as lived,” is nonexistent. Everything is a
reconstruction, a reinvention of what happened in the past. Following this line of
thinking, perceiving is a process of construction. All of us perceive things differently as a
result of constructing things differently. No model for the “real” world exists. Bruner was
quick to point out that the rightness of an autobiography is a function of the intentions
and conventions that govern its construction and its interpretation. He also believed that
the shape of a life experienced is a function of the narrative skills of the narrator. He was
quick to reference Henry James’s famous remark, that “adventures happen only to people
who know how to tell them” (as cited in Bruner, 1995, p.163).

Bruner described the framework be employed as “constructivist” in nature. He
asserted that the principal function of mind is one Of “world making.” Reality does not
exist independently Of Observers, but rather Observers construct their own reality by
construing and reconstruing their life experiences. Stories, as such, do not happen in the
real world; they are constructed in the minds of people.

There is no other way to describe “lived time” than by means of narrative
(Bruner, 1986). One Of Bruner’s goals was to transport his constructivist paradigm from
narrative in general to self-narrative in particular. In this effort, he argued that
autobiography is a continual process of “world making.” It is never complete, never
ﬁnished, but always in process. The “tool” used by the autobiographer to construct his or
her life narrative is the imagination. This is where all construction takes place in a

reﬂexive process.

19

Bruner’s key requirement for autobiography was that it must be communicable
through its representativeness. With this in mind, for someone to reﬂect on himself or
herself, he or she must reﬂect on the world in which the self lives. Throughout this
process, he or she must be able to communicate what is found to others.

Brunet, like McAdams, saw the autobiographical process as a representation of
the theme of agency. By this he meant that the autobiographer is in the driver’s seat. He
or She takes control, plays an active role in the construction process, makes things
happen, and essentially becomes a carrier of his or her own destiny. One of the problems,
as Brunet saw it, is that in the end we, the autobiographers, become the stories we
construct.

An important concept for Brunet (1987, 1999) was verisimilitude, which be
likened to “the believability of a legal brief as pled in court, but without speciﬁc beneﬁt
of the rules of legal evidence” (Brunet, 1995, p. 168). Now, Of course, the autobiographer
is not required to plead a case in court, nor is he or she required to cross-examine
witnesses. However, the autobiographer is required to provide a convincing enough case
that the reader is encouraged to embrace the narrative as representative of reality and
worthy of belief. Bruner’s claim was that verisimilitude does for narrative what
veriﬁcation and veriﬁability do for science and logic. It provides credibility and
believability.

Brunet (1995) reminded us that autobiography is an art form. AS such, “the
portrait [in our case the autobiography] is an impersonation of a set Of private beliefs,
attitudes and identities” (p. 174). And, he maintained, impersonation is a tool the artist
(autobiographer) uses to both invert and pervert all conceptions of reality in that never-

ending search for truth.

20

Brunet related the “life as lived” to the “text as constructed.” He said, “I have no
grand conclusion to offer save that autobiography is life construction through ‘text’
construction” (Brunet, 1995, p. 176). He contended that the search for life independent of
the autobiographical text is futile, for it is the text that constructs the life. As science
provides the paradigms for our construction of our version of nature, so culture provides
the paradigms for our construction of our lives. For Brunet, one of the key instruments a
culture uses to construct its lives is narrative, in all its forms and genres. And in this
construction process autobiography exists as an extension of ﬁction, an assumption that
carries with it the idea that “the shape of life comes ﬁrst from imagination rather than

from experience” (p. 176).

. . . As Linguistic Construction of the Self

Mark Freeman (1993) acts as a bridge, of sorts, from the realm of narrative
psychology to that which focuses on language and its usage in the construction and
reconstruction of the self. In his book Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative, he
examined the herrneneutical dilemma of trying to “understand” a self that is constructed
by language and generated in narrative (Josselson, 1995, p. 340). He adopted a strong
interpretive framework and focused on the idea of text creation and its interpretation as
the means to better understanding the individual self. For Freeman, human action is a
form of text in that it is a constellation of meanings calling forth the process of
interpretation. In light of all of this, Freeman maintained that his point of departure from
mainstream psychology was not with the life lived in and of itself, but rather with the
words used to speak of this life.

Early in his academic career, Freeman discovered that psychology is grounded in

empirical reality and is a slave to the scientiﬁc method. Knowledge is built on veriﬁable

21

and repeatable evidence. For Freeman, the whole realm of hermeneutics, the theory of
interpretation, is left untouched, and he was not comfortable with that. The life lived has
as much, if not more, to Offer than simply studying the mind and how it works. He
identiﬁed the key to his 1993 book as “rewriting the self: the process by which one’s past
and indeed oneself is ﬁgured anew through interpretation” (p. 3).

Freeman called for the human world to be treated in a different manner from the
world of Objects. When our goal is to understand, he called for the use of an interpretative
process whose aim is to understand what is said, acted, and lived. Exposition and
interpretation are two sides of the same coin. Both have their purpose and place, but they
are not interchangeable.

Josselson (1995) said of F reeman:

Freeman uses the idea of rewriting the self to rethink the concept of development.

Does the beginning lead to the end or the end to the beginning? Because the story

of development is always written from the standpoint of some outcome or ending

and the story projected backwards, the idea of development itself becomes a form

of interpretation. (p. 340)

Humans are housed within the conﬁnes of language, culture, and history. The
only way to understand experience ensconced within these conﬁnes is through the
process of interpretation. Freeman thought the best way to study the limits of this
hermeneutical inquiry was by studying the “self.” The problem, as he saw it, rests with
the deﬁnition and location of the self. When we seek to understand a book, a painting, or
some sort of Object, there is something there for us to focus our attention upon. But when
studying the self, what and where is it? There is nothing upon which to ﬁx our gaze.

When we try to interpret our past histories, we ﬁnd that subject and Obj ect are one

and the same. Essentially, we are interpreting that which has been fashioned through our

process of reﬂection with the aid of our imagination. Interpreting what is outside

22

ourselves requires going beyond what is and creating a meaningful context within which
to place what is. As such, the interpretive process is not as much an attempt to discern
what is true and what is false as it is to distinguish what is better from what is worse. In
light of this, rewriting the self is a process that has both an interpretive and a recollective
component.

One of the crucial issues for Freeman was the role played by the written text. As
he acknowledged early on, studying other lives is not a process of studying respective
lives as lived, but rather a process of studying texts composed about those lives. As such,
the role of a text is to recount, in written form, a lived life. The text is a unique body of
words giving shape to unique human experience.

What is the relationship between text and reality, or equivalently between word
and world? Steiner (as cited in Freeman, 1993) claimed that there is a “break Of covenant
between word and world” (p. 7). We can no longer assume that texts provide a window to
the real world, an objectively veriﬁable, “out there” sort of world. In all actuality, texts
really refer only to other texts, which in turn refer only to yet other texts, this chain of
intertextuality being endless. Everything we do is linked to language and this endless link
of text chains.

Another problem we face is that, not only are we dealing with texts about lives, as
opposed to the life itself, but we are also dealing with texts created through the process of
recollection and reﬂection. This takes us one step further from the actual “life-as-lived.”
Essentially, we are one step removed from the author, the liver of the life under study,
because all we have is the text he or She composed. In addition, we are one more step

removed because these texts are constructed from memory through the process of

23

recollection and reﬂection, not the most trustworthy processes when it comes to
veriﬁcation and reproducibility.

As we live our lives and create our texts, we discover that we remember
selectively and that we weave meanings together in the pattern of a narrative. If we are
honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that at times this narrative tends to look like
ﬁction. But the question we need to ask ourselves is this: Just because it looks created, a
product more of the imagination than the reason, is it necessarily false? We must
remember that the “self” is not a “thing.” It has no existence apart from me.

The logical end to this sort of analysis is an extreme form of skepticism. Freeman
admitted that because the world is so bathed in language, it is complex, ambiguous, and
cannot possibly be comprehended in the way an object can. If indeed the covenant
between word and world has been broken, then there is no world apart from language.
This implies there is nothing to get “quite right.” There is only language and a social
construction based on the use of this language. In this context, language refers only to
language, not to the world itself. In a sense, we could ask the question, “Has anyone
beheld an unlanguaged world?” If so, what does it look like, and how would we ever
know if such a world exists if we have only language to describe it?

In spite of all of this line of reasoning, Freeman acknowledged that some Of his
claims do not do justice to the life he lives. He argued that even if his self does not exist
apart from his consciousness Of it, it (his self) is still real and knowable.

Freeman acknowledged that much of what he wrote was intuitive by nature and
exuded elements of “faith.” The task at hand was to embrace the primacy of the word
without losing the world in the process. We do not have to choose between the two, in an

either/or sort of thinking; rather, we can have them both, a “both/and” type of thinking.

24

Skepticism, for him, as outlined above, was associated with the material world, the world
of things and objects. In the past, objects and things of the world have been associated
with what is really real. If this ceases to be real, all we are left with are words, and all
they can be associated with are other words. This has taken his Skepticism too far.
Interpretation and the interpretive process can and do expand the domain of knowledge
without taking us to the edges of futility.

Freeman concluded his book with an interesting treatise on the role of the poet in
today’s society and how this role ﬁts with the idea of narrative, memory, and history.
According to Freeman, the role of the poet is to rewrite the world in such a way that the
reader can ﬁnd himself or herself in a position of learning, seeing, or feeling something
about the world that might have gone unnoticed in any other way. Hidden within the
realm of poetry is the element of discovery. The same is true regarding the realm of
narrative. Both seek to uncover or discover something heretofore hidden from plain sight.

In other words, Freeman viewed poetry as having an ability or power to go
beyond, to probe, to look at life in depth. Poetry takes an individual understanding of
things to a deeper level. It does this through the revelatory power of language. This act of
giving primacy to language helps to maintain the covenant between word and world.
Language is much more than a mirror to the world. It helps to disclose the world to us.
Even if we allow that the relationship between word and world is tenuous, poetry and
narrative alike help to keep a complete break from occurring.

According to Freeman, narrative is more of a process than it is an end result. It
helps to explode the boundaries between art and science. Narrative imagination seeks to
disclose, articulate, and describe a world that most likely would not have existed were it

not for the act Of writing. In a sense, we can say that writing is an act of creation and that

25

life history is a sort of artifact of narrative imagination. We would not be too far aﬁeld
were we to say that if you kill the imagination you kill the self (Freeman, 1993; Metzger,
1992).

Finally, we can say that, for Freeman, truth resided both in the text and in the self.
He called for a “dialogic space Of interpretation” in an attempt to open the door for
further hermeneutical inquiry. He also spoke Of a “henneneutically imaginative
dimension” that which calls for further elaboration and development. In short, we might
say that the self, taking its cues from reality and through an imaginative process, makes a
signiﬁcant contribution to the body of both knowledge and truth. In essence, this is what
learning in general and adult learning in particular are all about.

Complimenting work that Freeman had done, Eakin (1999) laid his work
regarding the development and display of our selves against the backdrop of literature
and experience. He opened his book in the following manner:

This is a book about autobiography. Even more, though, it is a book about how

we come to be the people we say we are when we write—if we ever do—the

stories of our lives. Thus my concerns are both literary and experiential, for the
selves we display in autobiographies are doubly constructed, not only in the act of
writing a life story but also in a lifelong process of identity formation of which the

writing is usually a comparatively late phase. (p. ix)

He asked the questions, “Who is the ‘I’ who speaks in self-narratives?” and “Who
is the ‘I’ spoken about?” Are they one and the same? For Eakin, they were at one time,
but gradually over the course of time they came to represent two separate entities. Part of
the reason for his change in belief was related to his growth in awareness that the self is
greater than our capabilities of knowing it completely, for “knowledge of the self is
inseparable from the practice Of language” (p. x).

As a result, Eakin came to think of the “self” less as an entity, a knowable thing,

and more as a sort of “awareness in process.” His contention was that we do not pay

26

much attention to this process because it is not something that can be assessed or
measured. We might see the result Of the process, but we cannot see the process itself.

Eakin did not let this stop him, however. He strongly believed that we can still say
quite a bit, and with conﬁdence, about the nature and origins Of self-experience. As a
result, he set out to look at research in the ﬁelds of neurology, cognitive science, memory
studies, developmental psychology, and a host of other related ﬁelds in an effort to
rethink the nature of self-experience. He did this by looking at the ways in which our
sense of identity is shaped through the mechanism of our lives in and as bodies. He
moved from here into social sources Of identity, as reﬂected in both relational and
narrative modes of identity formation. For him there was no single story of the self, as he
once maintained. Rather, he borrowed from Howard Gardner and his contention that
there is “the mind’s new science” (as cited in Eakin, 1999, p. xi), and that from and
through this we more accurately reﬂect the current state of affairs by referring to
“registers of self and self-experience” (p. xi). There are a multitude of stories to tell and
more than one self with which to tell them.

Eakin quoted Lejeune when he deﬁned autobiography. According to Lejeune (as
cited in Eakin, 1999), autobiography is “retrospective prose narrative written by a real
person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular
the story of his personality” (p.2). For Lejeune, a “real person” is one whose existence is
conﬁrmed by vital statistics and is veriﬁable. As such, this “real person” is anchored in
the world beyond the text. According to Eakin (1989), Lejeune joined “others in stressing
that the true locus of reference in autobiography pertains not to the level of the utterance

but to the level of the enunciation, the autobiographical act, where the identity of author,

27

narrator, and protagonist is textually postulated, to be immediately grasped by the reader”
(p. X).

Others, such as Sprinker (as cited in Eakin, 1999) in particular, have contended
that this historical reference is nonsense and the task Of trying to prove its validity is
hopeless. Combining these two viewpoints, a commitment to the referentiality of the
autobiographical text and a commitment to the ﬁctiveness of the autobiography’s subject,
Eakin sought to draw these two perspectives together under what he called the “spirit of a
cultural anthropologist” (p. 4). This perspective is bent on “asking what such texts can
teach us about the ways in which individuals in a particular culture experience their sense
of being ‘1’” (p. 4).

Eakin began to reﬂect some of Freeman’s thinking when he asked such questions
as, “How much of what autobiographers say they experience is equivalent to what they
really experience, and how much of it is merely what they know how to say? Is there, we
should ask, a demonstrable difference between the psychological reality of selfhood and
the linguistic articulation Of that reality?” (p. 4).

Eakin also maintained that we tend to view autobiography as a literature of the
ﬁrst person. The problem this creates is the fact that the “I” writing and being written
about is not singular but rather plural. There are a number Of selves vying for expression.
Autobiographical criticism has not adequately addressed the extent to which the self is
both deﬁned by, and lives in terms of, its relationship with others. Eakin told us that, over
the course of time, a number of stories “crystallized my belief that all identity is
relational, and that the deﬁnition of autobiography, and its history as well, must be
stretched to reﬂect the kinds of self-writing in which relational identity is

characteristically displayed” (pp. 43-44).

28

This proved to be important for Eakin, and it is for us, for if this is true it means
that much if not all of our self-identity formation is constructed in conjunction with
others. No one is an island unto himself or herself, and so who I am cannot be separated
from who we are collectively. Autobiography as such becomes an interactive genre, one
that is not developed or read in isolation, but rather in collaboration with others.

“Narrative identity,” or identity that is formed through the process of narrative, is
important to an understanding of a linguistically constructed self. Narrative and identity
are so intertwined that it is difﬁcult to speak of one without speaking Of the other (Eakin,
1999, p. 100). “Narrative is peculiarly suited on the grounds of verisimilitude to the task
of representing our lives in time,” and we discover that both self and story are
“complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation”
(Eakin, 1999, p. 100). Consequently, narrative is not only an appropriate form for
identity’s expression, it becomes an actual part of identity’s content.

From this, Eakin concluded that narrative and identity are performed
Simultaneously. In fact, we might say each of us both constructs and lives a narrative, and
we do this in such a way that this narrative actually is who we are. The narrative we
construct is not merely about our self, but in some real way it is a constituent part of our
self. In a sense, we create or recreate ourselves through this process, or as Freeman would
say, we “rewrite” ourselves.

Conway (1998) and Dickerson (1989) conveyed similar themes in their writings
but with slightly less emphasis on the way philosophical presuppositions inﬂuence our
understanding. It was Dickerson’s contention that autobiography deﬁnes itself as a
system of voices, meaning that the author is in dialogic relationship with himself or

herself, others, and the elusive nature of language itself. A tension of sorts exists between

29

words and voices, and between oral and written, and it is the purpose of autobiography to
identify these tensions and address them accordingly. As such, autobiography is a
sophisticated form Of composing (Dickerson, 1989, p. 198).

Today, the only form of prose narrative that invites us to suspend our disbelief,
even if only for a moment, is the autobiography, deﬁned as an author’s “attempts to
narrate the history of a real life,” or the biography, deﬁned as “carefully documented
historical reconstructions of lives in times past” (Conway, 1998, p. 5). We ﬁnd in today’s
world that our own identities crave either conﬁrmation or transformation, and that we can
ﬁnd this conﬁrmation or transformation by trying on the identity of someone else and
seeing what ﬁts and what does not. Essentially, we see life through someone else’s eyes.
We relive their experience and are satisﬁed if we can conﬁrm or disconﬁrrn it in our own
eyes. The magic of entering another’s experience starts us thinking about our own
(Conway, 1998).

For both Conway and Dickerson, autobiography is essentially a constructivist’s
project. For Dickerson (1989), “world making” is the principal function of our minds. As
such, autobiography is a form of narrative that arises from the author’s dialogue with
himself or herself about this self, and speciﬁcally how it ﬁts in relation to Others and the
cultural landscape.

The writer of autobiography voices himself or herself into being. His or her voice
is engaged in the creation of itself as both subject and Object. He or she does this through
the use of language. The self that is created lives beyond the personal landscape and in
fact ﬁnds itself embedded in the ﬂow of history (Dickerson, 1989).

In the world Conway (1998) described, living belongs to the past whereas writing

belongs to the present. The act of writing makes the historical present and enables the

30

recovery of the yoice’s originating oral power through the process Of privileging the
author. This is the only form Of prose in which both writing and speaking jostle each
other, or struggle with each other, for equal space. When writing autobiography, we hold
conversations with ourselves and ﬁctionalized others in an attempt to ﬂush out our own
voice and create ourselves.

For Conway (1998), it all comes down to words and images. She contended that
memory, together with language, is what makes us human. “It gives cultural context for
the miraculous power of communication” (p. 176). In addition, memory and language
work together to provide each of us with an inner life plot that can guide us through life.
This plot has a familial element to it, it has a socially constructed element to it, it is fed
and nurtured by our imaginations, and it aids us in attempting to understand our role and
place in the universe.

We begin the process Of constructing ourselves by editing and interrogating the
past. In a sense, we are all autobiographers and it is our job to create and sustain life
stories by interrogating the past. In so doing, we assess the sequencing and interpretation
of information and events and use this to create storied lives. Whether our life plot
follows the script of a romance, an Odyssey, or a rebel; whether we are the author or the
victim; or whether our life plot is some combination of all of these elements at the same
time is not what is most important. Our voice is heard, and we are understood when we
can speak conﬁdently out of our understanding of our own experience (Conway, 1998).

For Dickerson (1989), the act of creation or writing accomplishes several things.
First, writing helps to create “shades of deeper meaning” (p. 140). AS we listen to others,
our life experiences, and ourselves, we interpret and reinterpret who we are and where we

have been. We arrive at a deeper level of understanding through this interpretive process.

31

Second, writing serves as the point of intersection for narration and reﬂection, and story-
telling and essay-writing. It is at this intersection that the author actually becomes the
text. The two are inseparable.

At this point of intersection, the writer comes to recognize several things.
Existence in the present is predicated on remembering the past and inferring the future.
The present ﬁnds its existence in its relation to past and future. Finally, at this
intersection, the writer discovers the power of language to appropriate the self in ways
that forever transform the relationship between subject and object (Dickerson, 1989). As
Freeman (1993) would say, world is changed into word in order to be acted upon.

In the next section, “Autobiography . . . As a Means Of Adult Learning and
Transformation,” Brady (1990 ) and Nelson (1994) demonstrate for us just how it is that
the construction of an autobiography can and does lead to personal learning and
transformation. Although they did not cite authors I referenced above, there is little doubt
but what their aims were similar to those of the authors cited above, that being a

transformation Of the world into word in order to be acted upon.

. . . As a Means of Adult Learning and Transformation

Closely related to the use of autobiography as a tool for narrative psychology, and
as a means of constructing and reconstructing both the self and the past through the use of
memory and language, is the use of autobiography as a means of learning and
transformation in the area of adult learning. What happens when we attempt to write
about our lives, or equivalently write our own autobiographies? According to Nelson
(1994), people “informally and autonomously create meaning for themselves from their
life experience, thereby becoming the authors Of both their own life and its account”

(p. 390). Becoming the author of our own life story is closely related to becoming the

32

authority in our own life. As a result of this creation, we become both a narrator and a
creator simultaneously and discover that at signiﬁcant moments we rise up to exercise
authority and autonomy in the creation of our own life stories.

Autobiography helps to locate an individual within the vast array of life
situations. In addition, it helps to provide some sort of structure and meaning to this life.
Brady (1990) said of autobiography,

Autobiography assumes the task of reconstructing the unity of life across time.

This lived unity of thought, feeling and action is not received from the outside. It

is certainly true that events inﬂuence us. Sometimes they determine us and always

they limit us. . . .

But the essential themes, the structural designs that impose themselves on
the complex array of exterior facts, are the constituent elements of the human
person. Autobiography is an important means to learning and self-knowledge
because it enables the person to recompose and interpret his or her life into a kind
of whole. (pp. 47-48)

Kazin (1979) explained his reason for writing in the following manner:

So that is why I write, to reorder an existence that man in the mass will never

reorder for me. Even autobiography is a necessary stratagem to gain something

more important than itself. By the time experience is distilled enough through our
minds to set some particular thing down on paper, so much unconscious
reordering has gone on that even the naive wish to be wholly “truthful” fades

before the intoxication of line, pattern, form. (p. 88)

Whether it is “reconstructing the unity of life across time” (Brady, 1990, pp. 47-48) or
“reorder[ing] an existence that man in the mass will never reorder for me” (Kazin, 1979,
p. 88), the results are similar: learning and transformation in the adult life.

Brady (1990) maintained that the type of learning that occurs as a result of this
autobiographical process is both self-directed and totally dependent on circumstances.
There is a component of this autobiographical process that is under our authority and

direction, that being the ability to look back and attempt to reconstruct the past. But there

is also a component that is not under our control. This component is dependent on

33

circumstances. Life is characterized as a making and remaking of choices, and meaning
seems to come through this self-directed and autonomous learning from experience.

Nelson (1994) deﬁned autobiographical learning in the following way:

1. In autobiographical learning, the person develops a sense of personal
autonomy and authority in his or her life. This awareness accompanies a critical review
of how the person’s values, feelings, ideas, and imagination have given Shape to his or
her life. The degree of emerging authority to shape one’s life is related to the limits of
personal capacities and the enabling constraints of one’s culture and physical
environment.

2. By discovering, in particular, one’s constructive capacity to imagine his or her
life as other than it is, the learner gains a sense of being the author of a life story that he
or She is able to change.

3. The learning is facilitated in the process of story telling, using imaginative
expressions, which engage tacit and symbolic dimensions Of the person’s knowing.

4. Autobiographical learning, which presupposes reﬂection and critical thinking,
is enabled by imagination, which leads to a transformation in the person’s perspective
and practice (p. 391).

For Brady (1990), autobiography was the act of drawing a self-portrait with
words, and it is a vitally important tool in the procedural arsenal Of adult learning.
Essentially, it facilitates and enhances the process of adult learning. To this extent he
believed there are three ways in which this learning takes place. These are through the
mechanisms of the remembered self, the ordered self, and the imagined self.

The remembered self. Reﬂection on our pasts is a form Of thinking and learning

that is most associated with autobiography. In this sense our memory serves as the

34

mechanism through which past “lived” experiences are relived and brought to the
forefront Of our minds. Essentially, memory provides a sort Of conscious consciousness
Of experience. In essence, the “now” of consciousness is the way it is because of the
interrelationship that exists between past experiences and our memories Of these
experiences.

Erikson (1966) made the claim that memories are a connector of meaning
between what happened once and what is happening now. In a certain sense
autobiography, the collection Of memories, is a second reading of human experience. A
new mode of being takes shape in the act of remembering. The truth of the self begins to
be revealed, and new avenues of learning are opened up because Of this revelation.

The ordered self. There is more to autobiography than enhancing learning through
the process of remembering and understanding the past from a current perspective.
According to Brady (1990), the ordered self is another way in which learning takes place.
In this sense, autobiography is a way to build and order the present by way of the
remembered past.

Human experience demands both understanding and interpretation. It is our desire
to construct order and meaning by looking back. The end result of this is a sort of
“focused uniﬁcation,” which is brought about through the process of remembering.
Memory helps to locate us in time and place and provide a sense of continuity with our
past.

The order we seek is not something that is “out there,” external to us and
empirically validated. Rather, this order is “interior” and engaged in a process of
continually coming into being. It is the task of autobiography to reconstruct the unity of a

life. It does this by focusing on the process of learning and increasing in self-knowledge

35

across the expanse of time. This process enables a person to recompose and interpret his
or her life into a whole, unitary being.

To effect this process, we must situate who we are in the context of who we have
been. Were we to consider only who we are, we would create only a fragmentary portion
of our being. Consideration of the past is necessary both to put the present in proper
perspective and to complete the picture of our being.

The imagined self. In a letter to his father, Yeats said, “One goes from year to
year gradually getting the disorder of one’s mind in order and this is the real impulse to
create. Till one has expressed a thing it is like an untidy, unswept, undusted corner of a
room” (as cited in Wade, 1995, p. 627). What is interesting here is the idea that
autobiography is both a form of art and a form of enlightenment. The autobiographer is
awakened to something new. He or she enjoys the miracle of discovery. But in order for
this to be truly effected, the autobiographer must be able to communicate this event. He
or she must be able to verbalize it, to wrap it in words, in order for it to be meaningful
and complete.

The imaginative dimension of autobiography does not show us as we are, or as we
have been, but rather it focuses us on who we believe ourselves to be and who we believe
ourselves to have been. In adult education circles this is equivalent to the quest of the
“idealized self-concept” (Brady, 1990).

This imaginative dimension is brought about through the act of creation. The
autobiographer creates the past by infusing facts and events with interpretation and
meaning and by creating images and metaphors to enhance our understanding. In a
certain sense there are truths that pertain to historical facts and truths that pertain to

imaginative creations. Through the use of metaphors, the autobiographer has the ability to

36

transform the strange into the familiar (Metzger, 1992). This act of creation, or
equivalently this autobiographical act, connects us with the deep reaches of ourselves and
our world Of experience.

Being an imaginative process, one from which the author develops new insights
and makes new discoveries, the autobiographical process is subject to an interpretive
procedure of understanding, one in which the author comes to understand the emergence
and development of the self. The texts themselves reveal how the author has overcome
various and sundry types of constraints, or how he or she has survived or lived through
various situations. The fact that learning has occurred is evident from the author’s
recounting how his or her life has changed, how he or she has adopted new modes of
behavior, or Simply how his or her individual views of the world have changed.

Autobiography is a form Of metaphor (Metzger, 1992; Nelson, 1994). As such, it
is important that learning be approached through the avenue of experience, and that
autobiography be viewed as a metaphor through which the imaginative construction of
the life of the learner can take place. The results of this approach will yield a
comprehensive understanding of the process of learning in times Of signiﬁcant personal
change (Nelson, 1994).

The imagination plays a critical role throughout this creative and reconstructive
process. As a source Of new meaning and understanding, “imagination functions in
knowing as a persistent questioning of all that mismatches between what we see in our
critical reﬂection on experience and what we usually name as what we know” (Nelson,
1994, p. 396). The image and the metaphor open the doors to the possibility of a new

order Of relationships within the individual’s life situation (Metzger, 1992).

37

Narration is an imaginative act of creation. Through this process or act, the author
interrogates his or her past in such a way that an encouraging future results from a
meaningful past. By ordering and reordering events in his or her experience, the author
creates a text that, over the course of time, becomes more comprehensible and
understandable to the researcher or reader who is trying to follow along.

Narration is an interpretive process. Ricoeur (1984) claimed, “The task Of
hermeneutics is to charter the unexplored resources of the to-be-said on the basis of the
already said. Imagination never resides in the unsaid” (p. 25).

Mezirow’s acknowledgement that critical reﬂection may be aided by “ﬁnding a
new metaphor that reorients problem-solving efforts in a more effective way” (Mezirow
et al., 1990, p. 12) still tends to indicate that transfonnative learning is principally a
rational-cognitive process (Dirkx, 1997; Nelson, 1994). “TO understand adult learning as
autobiography, it is necessary to conceive of the imagination’s part in constructing and
reshaping the life narrative as integral to both the formation of meaning perspectives and

their critique” (Nelson, 1994, p. 397).

Self-Directed Learning

In essence, the purpose of learning is to enable us to understand the meaning of
our experiences [italics added] and to realize values in our lives. For the most
part, we learn new meanings by spelling out an experience or an aspect of an
experience that we have not yet made explicit and by seeking to validate our
interpretation of its meanings. (Mezirow, 1985, p. 17)

The concept of self-directed learning has connotations of autonomy,
independence, and isolation, and it is easy to conceive of the self-directed learner
as one who pursues learning with a minimum of assistance from external sources.
Indeed, individual control over learning is Often claimed to be the distinctive
characteristic of self-directed learning. (Brookﬁeld, 1985, p. 7)

Self-directed learning and independent learning are two concepts that are often

used interchangeably with one another. Brookﬁeld (1985) pointed out that the very
38

concept of self-directed learning assumes “the individual’s ability to plan and conduct
learning activities” (p. 14). Coupled with this is the idea that self-directed learners require
little assistance from external sources to help them with their learning tasks. In fact, self-
control is often thought to be the key distinction of self-directed learning (Knowles,
1975).

Independent learning, or learning on one’s own, has been the primary mode Of
learning throughout the course of time. Research into this mode of learning, however, has
been a fairly recent phenomenon. Why is this? One of the reasons Merriam and
Cafferella (1999) suggested is the fact that self-directed learning has such widespread
applicability. It is inherent in the process of living itself and can be seen at work in efforts
that range from ﬁxing an appliance, to freeing oneself from an addictive behavior, to
helping oneself become a better public Speaker.

Signiﬁcant roadblocks to research on self-directed learning are the location and
the vocation of the researchers themselves. In the past, researchers located within the
walls of the academy performed the majority Of research on self-directed learning, and
their focus was on self-directed learning that took place within those walls. In point of
fact, much of the self-directed learning that took place did so outside of the walls of
academe.

Building on a foundation established by Houle (1961), Tough (1967, 1971)
moved efforts outside the academy walls by focusing on learning projects Of 66 people
living in Ontario, Canada. From this research, he concluded that “highly deliberate efforts
to learn take place all around you. The members of your family, your neighbors,
colleagues, and acquaintances probably initiate and complete several learning efforts,

though you may not be aware of it” (as cited in Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, p. 289).

39

More recently, research into self-directed learning has moved from descriptive
research (Brockett, 1985; Caffarella & O’Donnell, 1987, 1989), to focusing on the
learning process itself (Brockett & Hiemstra, 1991; Candy, 1991; Garrison, 1997), to
focusing on the characteristics and styles of learners who are self-directed (Candy, 1991;
Chene, 1983). Candy (1991) claimed there was a lack of alignment between research
paradigms used by researchers and the nature of the phenomenon being studied. Self-
directed learning had been studied from a positivist perspective and needed to be looked
at from a constructivist perspective or through an interpretive approach. This led to a
greater focus on the learning process itself. As the 20th century drew to a close, the
development of self-directed-leaming models was beginning to cover the self-directed-
leaming landscape (Brockett & Hiemstra, 1991; Candy, 1991; Garrison, 1997; Spear,
1988).

Merriam and Caffarella (1999) mapped research on self-directed learning into
three broad categories: (a) literature regarding goals of self-directed learning, (b) research
that focuses on self-directed learning as a form of study or process, and (0) literature that
considers self-directedness to be a personal attribute of the learner. The major difference
from their work in 1991 was the addition of the category regarding the goals of self-

directed learning (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, 1999).

. . . As a Set of Goals

Mem'am and Caffarella (1999) subdivided goals of self-directed learning into
three major aims or intentions. These are (a) to enhance the ability of adult learners to be
self-directed in their learning, (b) to foster transformational learning as central to self-
directed learning and (c) to promote emancipatory learning and social action as an

integral part of self-directed learning.
40

Tough (1967, 1971), Knowles (1975, 1980), and Brockett and Hiemstra (1991)
performed research from a humanistic perspective, meaning that one Of the primary goals
of self-directed learning has been the development of the leamer’s capacity to be self-
directed. The role of the adult educator, in turn, is to help adults learn in ways that enable
them to function as self-directed learners” (Mezirow, 1981).

Brookﬁeld (1986) and Mezirow (1985, 1991) introduced the second goal, which
is to see transformational learning as central to the process of self—directed learning. In
the preface to his book Transforrnative Dimensions of Adult Learning, Mezirow (1991)
laid out the background for his theory:

My approach to transformation theory, as elaborated in this book, has as its

current context the insurgence of constructivism, critical theory, and

deconstructivism in social theory and in all of the social sciences, law, literature,
and art. Transformation theory also grows out of the cognitive revolution in
psychology and psychotherapy instigated by scores Of studies that have found that
it is not so much what happens to people but how they interpret and explain what

happens to them that determines their actions, their hopes, their contentment and
emotional well-being, and their performance. (p. xiii)

The third goal relates to the promotion of emancipatory learning and social action
and purports to Show this to be integral to the self-directed-leaming process. Brazilian
educator Paulo F reire (1970) provided the impetus behind the use of adult education as
the means to transform oppressed people into being critically aware Of forces for
liberating change. “Emancipatory learning . . . is a process of freeing ourselves from
forces that limit our Options and our control over our lives, forces that have been taken
for granted or seen as beyond our control” (Cranton, 1994, p. 16).

Freire considered the intention of adult transformational learning to be social
action designed to produce change necessary for a more just society. Initially designed to
enhance literacy education for Brazil's poorest, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

(1970) became a means of awakening any and all oppressed people to potential inequities

41

in their respective cultures. The philosophy encourages autonomous self-directed learning
as a means of moving adults away from a concept of “banking education,” i.e.,

accumulating knowledge, to one of active, freedom seeking, self-directed education.

. . . As a Learning Process

Merriam and Caffarella (1991) focused on the learning process. As a process,
self-directed learning “is a form of study in which learners have the primary
responsibility for planning, carrying out, and evaluating their own learning experiences”
(p. 41). The authors maintained that, over the past decade, there has been a shift of sorts
from a model in which self-directed learning is characterized as a linear, step-by-step,
programmed course of instruction, to a model that permits the learner greater control over
his or her learning destiny. The reason for this change is the discovery of a multitude of
factors that drive the learning process, not the least of which are a leamer’s motivation,
personal circumstances, ability, and access to leaming—both spatial/temporal access and
technology access.

Tough (1971) and Knowles (1975) provided early conceptualization of the
modeling Of the self-directed-leaming process. One of Knowles’s key contributions was
related to the issue of responsibility for the self-directed—leaming process. Whose
responsibility is it? Knowles described self-directed learning in the following manner,

In its broadest meaning, “self-directed learning” describes a process in which

individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing

their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material

resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies,
and evaluating learning outcomes. Other labels found in the literature to describe

this process are “self-planned learning,” “inquiry method,” “independent
learning,” “self-education,” “self-instruction,” “self-teaching,” “self-study,” and

“autonomous learning.” (p.18)

42

Tough (1979) provided an operational deﬁnition of the self-directed-learning
process in his study of learning projects and his use of veriﬁcation studies (Merriam &
Caffarella, 1991). In fact, Tough’s model became foundational for veriﬁcation studies.
Through his work, self-directed learning was shown to exist in many different forms and
in many different populations. Even though he was criticized for studying too narrow a
population and relying too much on middle-class sampling, as well as for the prompting
techniques he used during interviews, Tough still laid down a ﬁrm foundation for the
study of the self-directed-leaming process.

Merriam and Caffarella (1999) divided the study of the self-directed-leaming
process into the development of three unique models. The ﬁrst model they deﬁned as
linear. The heart of the work here was related to how adults go about the process of self-
directed learning, speciﬁcally, how they plan and execute self-directed learning and what
resources they use in the process. Knowles (1975, 1980) helped to conceptualize this
process as linear steps: decide what to learn, set goals to learn, select learning activities,
and evaluate efforts. This linear approach is most likely due to the fact that early work
was based on a study of teachers who tended to approach problems in a linear, stepwise
fashion.

The second model, which is more interactive in nature, arose from the
understanding that adult learners Often do not plan self-directed-learning activities in
advance. Adults frequently follow numerous paths to reach their objectives, and often
there are multiple factors that enter to describe the self-directed-leaming process.
People’s ability to locate appropriate and useful resources is often a limiting factor.
Within this context, Merriam and Caffarella cited Spear’s (1988) work, in which he used

cluster analysis to deﬁne interactive elements that identify a learning transaction. For

43

him, learning activities fell into three broad clusters: knowledge, action, and environment
(Merriam & Caffarella, 1999).

Berger (1990) built on these results and concluded from her study of 20 white
males with no formal degrees past high school that there was little to no preplanning of
their self-directed-learning activities. The element of trial and error was apparent in an
emphasis on a hands-on approach to learning.

Another interactive model was the one developed by Brockett and Hiemstra
(1991). According to Brockett and Hiemstra, three streams of inquiry have developed
within the domain of self-directed research. The ﬁrst stream of research, attributed to
Tough (1971, 1979) and his work on “The Adult’s Learning Projects,” has provided vast
amounts of descriptive information related to the frequency of self-planning by adult
learners. The second stream they identiﬁed moves more into the realm of psychology by
attempting to identify, deﬁne, and measure such variables as motivation, creativity, and
intellectual development. This approach has led to the development of self-directed
readiness scales and tests, all designed to measure an adult’s readiness to engage in self-
directed-leaming activities. The third stream of research centers on qualitative methods of
inquiry in an effort to help explain meanings and contexts of self-directed learning in
adults. In their work, Merriam and Caffarella (1999) attempted to combine instructional
method processes (self-directed learning) with personality characteristics of the
individual learner (learner self-direction).

The third category of models described by Merriam and Caffarella is what they
called “instructional models.” This category includes interactive models that attempt to
create a framework in which instructors in formal settings could integrate self-directed-

leaming methods with their programs, activities, and curriculum. Grow’s (1991) staged

44

self-directed learning is one such model. With this model, Grow attempted to specify

how teachers can help students become more self-directed in their learning.

. . . As Personal Attribute or Experience

The third broad area of research in the area of self-directed learning is related to
viewing self-direction as a personal attribute or characteristic, or as a personal
experience. Several authors (Brockett & Hiemstra, 1991; Candy, 1991; Knowles, 1980)
have helped to lay this foundation by asserting that self-direction and autonomy are
foundational to learning in adulthood. Brockett and Hiemstra (1991) identiﬁed a
relationship between what they called learner self-direction, a characteristic or trait of
learners that enables them to assume primary responsibility for their learning activity, and
a positive self-concept.

Research in this area has spawned measurement tools such as “self-directed
readiness” (Guglielmino, 1997). Chene (I983) claimed there are three elements that
characterize an autonomous or self-directed learner: independence, the ability to make
choices, and the capacity to articulate the norms and limits of a learning activity. Others
have looked at a variety Of variables related to self-directed learning, such as ﬁeld
dependence and independence (Brookﬁeld, 1986), autonomy (Candy, 1991; Chene,
1983), and educational level (Confessore & Confessore, 1994).

Part of the uniqueness of self-directed learning is the intuitive dimension it
exhibits. Brookﬁeld (1987) used the term insight realization to characterize a leamer’s
experience with unexpected circumstances. Chopra (1980), in turn, maintained that most
people fail to focus their inner awareness or use its available power, even in the most
trying Of moments. Wacks (1987) asked, “Yet when are we ever taught or even

encouraged to listen to, and follow, the still small voice within?” (p. 50). As Emerson (as

45

cited in Wacks, 1987) said, “To ﬁnish the moment, to ﬁnd the joumey’s end in every step
of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom” (p. 50)

Several authors have written about the “internal changes” that Often occur and the
importance Of “making meaning” to the overall process of self-directed learning.
Brookﬁeld (1986) deﬁned self—directed learning as “the mode of learning characteristic
of an adult who is in the process of realizing that his or her adulthood is concerned as
much with an internal change of consciousness as with external management Of
instructional events” (p. 58). Further on he stated, “The most complete form of self-
directed learning occurs when process and reﬂection are married in the adult’s pursuit of
meaning” (p. 58). Merriam and Caffarella (1991) also pursued this idea of the importance
of internal meaning-making to adult learners. For them, self-directed learning was “a
form of study in which learners have the primary responsibility for planning, carrying
out, and evaluating their own learning experiences” (p. 41). For Merriam and Caffarella,
this was a natural consequence of the process of aging and maturing. As adults grow
Older and mature, there is a natural proclivity toward independence and a search for
meaning (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999).

What triggers the desire or need to learn? Aslanian and Brickell (1982) claimed
that the conversion from passive learner to active learner came as the result of a speciﬁc
life event or experience. This event could be almost anything, ranging from an illness to a
job loss to a religious quest. Based on their work they explained,

Every adult who learned because of a transition pointed to a speciﬁc event in his

or her life that signaled, precipitated, or triggered the transition and thus the

learning. Getting hired or getting ﬁred, getting married or getting divorced,

getting sick, getting elected, or moving to a new city were the kinds of events that
told the adults it was time to learn. (p. 164)

46

Similarly, Spear and Mocker (1984) claimed that a major change in a life
circumstance was the instigating force for undertaking a learning project. Based on their
work, they concluded that the circumstance itself was what provided structure and
organization to the learning process. They derived what they called the organizing
circumstance, “which postulates that self-directed learners, rather than preplanning their
projects, tend to select a course from limited alternatives which occur fortuitously within
their environment, and which structures their learning projects” (p. 4).

It is also interesting that, although postmodemists have claimed that knowledge is
socially constructed by the individual and does not exist in any form independent Of the
observer (Grentz, 1996), each of the authors examined in this study purported to have
discovered something. Through each of their experiences, they learned and they
discovered something real and something true both about themselves and about life. Each
experienced this “awakening” within the conﬁnes of a different sociocultural context.
Each experienced different life stories. But the fact remains, each discovered something
new and fresh, and it is doubtful whether this discovery would ever have been made were
it not for the “journey” each individual undertook.

In conclusion, we see that the future of self-directed learning is unclear. Which
direction research should and will take from here is not certain (Merriam, 2001). Brockett
et a1. (2000) conducted a content analysis of some 122 articles related to self-directed
learning published in 14 periodicals between 1980 and 1998. Results showed there was a
steady decline in the number of articles on self-directed learning since the mid-19805.
Brockett et al.’s conclusion was that this indicator, coupled with the Shift away from the
learner as the center Of attention to the sociopolitical context of adult education as the

center of attention, might suggest that self-directed learning has reached its zenith. The

47

real challenge, according to Brockett et al., was how to take self-directed learning to a
new level. One way to do this is to focus on the quality of the experience (Merriam,
2001). This was the purpose Of my study.

My intention in the analysis that follows is not to subject each autobiography to a
categorical analysis, thereby forcing each text into a mold that may not ﬁt it very well.
Rather, I have attempted to allow the texts to speak for themselves and to call for their
own modes of representation. As a consequence, it is likely that some, but not all, of the

Six categories described above will apply to any one text.

48

CHAPTER 2

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF
RELIGIOUS PILGRIMAGE
Introduction

This chapter explores learning that occurred in the lives of two authors, as the
result of writing about their religious experience. Two autobiographical accounts are used
in this exploration. The ﬁrst is Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life by
Patricia Hampl. This is a narrative account of one person’s journey to extricate herself
from the conﬁnes of her Catholic heritage. Instead, as she reﬂects and composes, she
ﬁnds herself embracing her heritage in a new and meaningful manner. The second is The
Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem by Samuel Heilman. This is a narrative
account of one man’s journey to Jerusalem in an effort to ﬁnd his heritage. He
acknowledged early in his account that he had gone to Jerusalem as a sociologist and
returned to his academic position as an Orthodox Jew. His autobiography is an account of
his conversion.

I summarize the story underlying each autobiography, drawing special attention to
times and substance Of learning. At the end of each autobiographical section, I provide a
summary of the lessons each author learned his or her their unique self-directed learning
process. The ﬁnal section is a brief summary of the chapter.

Both authors returned to the physical location of their religious roots. Hampl,
being Catholic, returned to Italy to follow St. Francis of Assisi’s steps, a religious
pilgrimage Often undertaken by members Of the Catholic faith. Heilman, being Jewish,

returned to Jerusalem and spent a year living and worshipping among various

49

communities of devout Orthodox Jews. Both were able to experience ﬁrst hand the
culture, the environment, and the life of their respective religious communities.

In each instance, a story was created from a particular situation (Gomick, 20013).
In both cases, the situation was much more than a unique journey with people of like
beliefs at a particular point in Space and time. Rather, the situation pertained to their
respective places in life itself, characterized by memories, images, and words. But more
than this, it represented for each of these authors a self-directed learning process that
culminated in the discovery of meaning and signiﬁcance.

In The Situation @d the Story. Gomick (2001b) laid hold of the story behind
Gosse’s Father and Son. In her analysis of this memoir, she made this statement:

What he does feel—and this stronger and stronger each year—is a growing love

of language and of narrative: the language of the imagination, the tale of human

emotion hidden in the prose. . . . Alone, within the silent embrace of his own
unspoken thought, through the remarkable companionship he ﬁnds in his own
growing consciousness, Gosse encounters a “self” at the center whose demands

slowly overtake him. (pp. 95-96)

“Narrative: the language Of the imagination, the tale of human emotion hidden in
the prose” (Gomick, 2001b, p. 95). Nothing could be more descriptive of the project each
of these authors undertook as each discovered a “self” that lay at their respective centers,
gave it voice, and called it into being.

Through this analysis, we will see that learning was at the core of all that
transpired. Each author learned from and through Others during the course Of his or her
travels. Each reﬂected on different experiences and circumstances, and each created a

unique and meaningful story. Through the process Of reﬂection and creation, learning

took place in such a manner that the author was left a changed person.

50

BatricigLHampl: Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplaftive Life

In this section, I will look at the autobiography of Patricia Hampl. Learning for
her was transacted through the creation of Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative
Lifﬁ. In and through this narrative, she takes us to signiﬁcant people, places, and things in
her life in an endeavor to Show us how and why they were signiﬁcant back then, and
what they now meant to her. Insights she attained and learning she achieved were brought
about and fueled by a pilgrimage she took to Italy to follow St. Francis of Assisi’s steps.
Then a year later, she took a week-long pilgrimage Of sorts to Rosethom, a small
Cictercian woman’s monastery in California. From and through this process of

interpreting her past, she emerged a new and changed person.

Faith or Learning by Remembering

In the ﬁrst section, entitled Faith, Hampl explained why it was she felt compelled
to undertake this pilgrimage. Here she reﬂected on her upbringing and signiﬁcant
relationships in her past that had all worked together as motivation for this undertaking.
This is the section Brady (1990) would refer to as the remembered self. She looked back
to reﬂect, reminisce, and essentially begin the formal process of her narrative formation,
of rewriting the story Of herself (Freeman, 1993).

Hampl’s story began, both physically and spiritually, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Born
to a working-class family in a working-class neighborhood, she was raised in a strongly
Catholic family. The Catholic Church in general and St. Luke’s parish in particular
provided the framework and guidelines for her life. In fact, it might have given her too
much too soon. She said of her life:

Mine was a Catholic girlhood spent gorging on metaphor—Mystical Body,

transubstantiation, dark night of the soul, the little martyrdom of everyday life.
And remember, girls, life is a journey. Your own life is a pilgrimage. Maybe we

51

had too much meaning too early. It was like having too much money. The
quirkiness of life was betrayed, given inﬂated signiﬁcance by our rich symbology.

(P- 6)

Hampl’s struggle, as she began to reﬂect, was a struggle with meaning. She
decided that now, some 30 to 40 years later, was the time to put things right. She
confessed, “I’d come to the conviction that I had to see the Old world of Catholicism”

(p. 8). As She opened the window on her process of reﬂection and reminiscing early on,
she looked back on her days as a student in parochial schools.

Hampl married rather late in life. She was past 40 when the event ﬁnally occurred
(p. 13). Ironically, on the night before the actual ceremony, she experienced a dream in
which she pictured herself running through a ﬁeld in an attempt to catch a group of nuns
heading for a monastery. The monastery proved to be farther away than it appeared. AS a
result, she never caught the nuns. When she ﬁnally arrived, She discovered all at once that
“I can’t go in there, I’m getting married” (p. 13). This was truly signiﬁcant for a Catholic
woman, as She had been conditioned through her parochial education to believe that
becoming a nun was one of the greatest callings, if not the greatest calling, in a woman’s
life. The commitment to marry shut this door forever.

Of particular interest was the way that Hampl encapsulated this moment in time,
and a signiﬁcant moment it was, for it created a clear line of demarcation between what
had gone before and what was to come after in her life. Her reﬂection process focused on
a dream, a scene, an imaginary construction from which and through which she came
both to learn and to understand a great deal about herself. She included in this ﬁrst
section what I chose to call the “Explanation” because it explained quite a bit to her about

herself and set the stage for further discovery. The ﬁrst part of her life, that part in which

52

she dreamed Of “professional” roles within the Catholic Church, ended once and for all
when She married.

Hampl fulﬁlled the role of an observer in the “Explanation” section of her
autobiography. Here, she traveled from St. Paul to Assisi and wandered about Assisi with
a lay tour group, fellow pilgrims in a certain sense. Her trip was classiﬁed as a walking
tour and given the name “The Road to Assisi” (p. 10). She observed herself and tried to
analyze early on just why it was She was undertaking this pilgrimage. A sense of urgency
overtook her and refused to lessen its grip on her. When she asked herself why she was
doing this, she responded,

Looking for our roots, we say. But roots are buried: they’re supposed to be. And

the past isn’t alive. Only our urgency is. Maybe this urgency is the past, the only

juice still Spurting from the source that made us. It must be this urgency, a

peculiar form Of desire, that makes us zoom around, looking for what time has put

back in its breast pocket. (p. 9)

This sense of conviction and urgency led to two distinct but interrelated lessons
that she learned. One lesson was constructed on the foundation of prayer, speciﬁcally, its
efﬁcacy and relevance to daily living. The second related to her discovery that, in order
for there to be any hope of discovering meaning and signiﬁcance in the drama of life, she
needed to move from being an observer to being a participant. She stated poignantly with
regard to the need to participate, “I knew I must set out on the trail. That, too, was
instinct: I didn’t know how to think about the past without going somewhere. “You’re
going on a pilgrimage,” Donnie had said. And I had growled at her” (p. 56). What we see
here is a key characteristic of the self-directed learner, that being a sense of autonomy, a
sense of being in control of her own learning process (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991).

Hampl provided detailed descriptions of others on this trip. Some of these

acquaintances, such as Will and Alma, prompted Hampl to think and reﬂect in ways that

53

yielded an abundance of fruit when she spent time at Rosethom, the retreat center she

discussed in the third section.
Will’s question—“DO you believe in GOd?”—was not my question. Time

magazine, too, had broken the wrong story all those years ago when it published
its famous GOD IS DEAD cover. God was not at stake. Prayer was the fatality.

Prayer was dead.

This was what I could not accept. Whether God exists or not remains
forever a fascination. But God, believed in or not, remains only the elected
Ofﬁcial for the colossal job Of mystery. . . . As the human response to this
mystery, prayer, not the existence of God, is the thing to be decided. (p. 35)

This discovery, this conclusion, marked a signiﬁcant moment in time for Hampl.
She realized at that moment that she had been “barking up the wrong tree” for much of
her life. The culture around her had invited her to ask the wrong question. She was not
cognizant of an overt internal battle that had characterized her life when it came to the
question, “DO you believe in God?” But she did realize this was the wrong question. This
question answered itself when the issue of prayer was resolved.

It is important to take notice that this moment of insight or realization, this
learning, was brought about through the re-creation Of a conversation with Will. Once
again, we see the imagination playing a signiﬁcant role in Hampl’s learning process. The
insight derived was a result of the imaginative recreation of dialog between herself and
Will.

It is also important to notice that this moment of deeper understanding was purely
intellectual in nature. It was the result of reﬂecting on Will, the nature of his question, the
Ii_m§ magazine article, her life in general, and perhaps a whole host of other issues of
which she was not cognizant. In a sense, there was no other conclusion she could draw.
Prayer was the fatality and it always had been. How could she have missed this?

We need to recognize this discovery for what it is in this “Faith” section. Later,

when she encountered Felix in the “Miracles” section, and then Andre at the Cistercian

54

woman’s monastery in the “Silence” section, her understanding of prayer was further
deepened and enhanced because for these two men prayer represented a way of life, a
living reality. Through these men she saw prayer in action and she saw the transforrnative
power it could have in a life.

As we saw earlier, this pilgrimage was driven by both a sense of conviction and a
sense of urgency. But there was also a desire to create. Hampl looked back over her life,
that which tended to be void and without form, and recognized a need and desire to create
something. She did not know what, but she knew she must create. It came to a head,
prompted by Alma’s question, “Tell me, do you write from your life or from—or from
imagination?” (p. 53). As Hampl reﬂected on this question, she decided and told herself,
“I write from my life and from imagination. That’s what it is to write about—or from—
the past. NO doubt I write about the past because I want it to be the past” (p. 55).

But because there was an imaginary component to what she did, this does not
mean it was untruthful. As Freeman (1993) said, “Yes, self and world are fundamentally
products of the imagination. But no, they are not to be thought of as merely imaginary, in
the sense of being essentially ﬁctional creations” (p. 70). Hampl went on to say:

I started with the knowledge, like the “given” at the start of a geometry problem,

that there was something Catholic about the virginal self, with its stubborn habit

of trust and its taste for ﬁnding meaning in everything. Back to the Church to

touch the dusty relics. (p. 56)

As Hampl reﬂected on her earlier years in school, she became aware of just how
important literature and the world of imagination were to her. Gomick (2001a) described
it as follows: “Narrative: the language of the imagination, the tale of human emotion
hidden in the prose” (p. 95). When Hampl looked back on her parochial-school days, she

reﬂected this same idea when she said, “Our real residence was language itself. Literature

was the ancestral estate to which we were natural, unquestioned heirs” (p. 61).

55

And ﬁnally, as Hampl reminisced further, she arrived at a fundamental
understanding of her life to date. This understanding awakened and redirected her. She
said, “Observation alone, the life of looking. . . . Life, fundamentally, was neither active
nor passive. It was contemplative. . . . Pondering was the highest vocation”(p. 62).

SO we ask ourselves, what is contemplation? What it is to be contemplative?
Merton (1961) shed some light on this when he said,

Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual

life. . . . It is spiritual wonder. . . . It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and

being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and inﬁnitely abundant

Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It

knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicable, but with a certitude that goes beyond

reason and beyond simple faith. (p. 1)

“You have to get in there,” Donnie told Hampl numerous times in an attempt to
share with her some of life’s lessons She (Donnie) had learned. Donnie was a spiritual
guide, Hampl’s spiritual guide, and played a critical role in Hampl’s pilgrimage. She was
someone to whom Hampl could go and talk, test out ideas and thoughts, and receive help
and guidance. This advice never came in the form of direct answers, but rather in the
form Of questions and comments to help guide Hampl along her way.

Donnie played a critical role in Hampl’s narrative construction. Donnie’s role was
simply to ask questions and provide insight from her own experience. In this context,
learning for Hampl happened as she set out to experience new avenues and meet new
people. Everything she learned, every change that occurred to her, happened because she
traveled away from home to encounter new places and new people.

Donnie was an enigma for Hampl, who said of her, “I can’t ﬁgure her. Yet I keep
going back to visit her, to sort out what I thought was the past, my dead Catholic past,

only to ﬁnd it isn’t dead at all” (p. 7). Hampl loathed the language Donnie tried to use to

capture the venture Hampl undertook. “It’s called ‘spiritual direction,’ what we’re

56

doing,” Donnie said one day. Hampl’s comment to this was simply, “Whatever we were
doing, I found I required it, though I frown at the terms—spiritual direction, pilgrimage”
(p. 7).

“Spiritual awakenings” for Hampl always came as a result of interactions with
other people. Were Hampl to have visited a prison cell instead of Assisi and Rosethom, it
is highly unlikely she would have been challenged to learn or change in any way. It was
always people, what they said or simply who they were, in these new and different
contexts that stimulated her to reﬂect on her past and see pieces of her life’s puzzle ﬁt
together in ways she had never dreamed possible.

The dawn of Hampl’s awakening began when the tour group departed and she
was left on her own in a monastery in Assisi for ten days. It was during this time that she
began to rummage through old slides of her memories. She never saw a complete story,
she said, but rather a series of memories She recalled much like a viewer would go though
old slides in a slide carrousel. This ten-day experience, in which she found herself all
alone in Assisi, was the beginning of a transformation that would culminate the next year
when she visited a monastery in California.

But even more than the need to participate, Hampl wanted to live and to
experience life. She was tired of the need to categorize and group people, places, and
things. She said of this,

I was sick with insight, fed up with versions. . . . People wished to name things

now, instead of living them. Intended to be less painful, but it was curiously

bloodless, this capacity to label whole episodes, years, loves. . . . I began to
wonder if I had jumped from the breathtaking innocence of a girlhood where
everything was a cliff-hanger. . . . Maybe I’d missed entirely the mid-stroke of

maturity with its moxie of a life being lived. (p. 12)

This ﬁrst section was characterized by Hampl’s confession that she was tired of

categorizing and naming. Theoretical constructions, although important, had served their

57

purpose. Her need to explain gave way to her need for understanding. At the beginning,
she was driven by a sense of urgency to throw off the yoke of her Catholic upbringing.
But as she ﬁnished this section, she had learned something signiﬁcant. She had learned
she could not disengage herself from her remembered past (Brady, 1990). She began to
recognize that her identity was inextricably woven with her memories of the past (Brunet,
1987, 1995; McAdams, 1993, 1996). The transformation process began, learning and
meaning started to coalesce, and all because She started to remember (Brady, 1990;

Brunet, 1995; McAdams, 1996; Nelson, 1994)

Miracles or Learning. Meaning, and Connecting

The second section of Hampl’s narrative, entitled “Miracles,” centered on a
period characterized by solitude and deep inner reﬂection. Hampl began to connect
images and conversations (Erikson, 1996). For ten days right at the start, she was alone in
a room at Poor Clare monastery of Santa Chiara in Assisi. It was during this period that
she arrived at some basic understandings of herself and her role in the mystery of Life.

Hampl began this time as a good academician by assuming the role of an
observer. She watched the interaction between people, places, and things and recorded
her observations religiously. And then something happened, something that overtook her
and began a transformation deep within. She wrote:

Two weeks of brief encounters seemed to erase themselves, leaving real time

amorphous, mistily vague as the Plain of Spoleto below the balcony of the

Annunciation, where I spent most of my days alone, staring out, giving myself

over to my drawings, staring some more. (p. 106)

All of this seemed to culminate in a scene on Hampl’s balcony, where memories

began to ﬂood her mind. In fact, the rapidity and intensity with which these memories

arrived were tantamount to a “ﬂash ﬂood” of sorts, in that they spilled over into her soul

58

and caused a change within her that would not let her ever be the same again. She stated,
“But these things that captivated me as I sat on the balcony making my blurry drawings,
letting the days drift by without making a mark—these things were not stories. They were
brief testimonies of perception, bits of consciousness” (p. 108). This period of solitude,
being alone with herself, culminated in her statement, “By the end of the ﬁrst week I
realized that, for once, I wished to be nobody else. . . . I was free—always had been free”
(p. 108).

One of the fundamental principles underlying autobiographical theory is the idea
that autobiography is a process of reconstructive discovery and interpretation, and that as
part of the interpretive process it leads to greater understanding (Freeman, 1993). For
Hampl, prayer was the instrument, the means, through which this process was enacted. It
was not something that was done or performed for the beneﬁt of anyone. Rather, it was a
lived reality. Felix Opened this door to her and showed her the reality behind prayer. This
was what gave meaning to her endeavors, what allowed Hampl, or anyone, to enter in and
become a participant. You have to get in there. Prayer was the avenue that Hampl had to
tread to “get in there.”

In this section, Felix was instrumental in the unfolding of her understanding of
prayer. AS Donnie was to Hampl in the ﬁrst section, so Felix was to her in the second
section. Felix played a pivotal role in Hampl’s transformation because he himself had
experienced a transformation. It seemed as though Felix could have been a character from
the Gospel narratives. Just as people who touched or were touched by Jesus were never
again the same, SO, too, Hampl’s encounter with Felix left her changed, never again to be

the same.

59

When Hampl ﬁrst encountered Felix in Rome, she was not sure how to interpret
him. At ﬁrst She wondered whether he was not just a cynic, someone whose faith had
been tested in much the same way that a tornado tests the foundation of a building
ediﬁce. The building weathers the storm, but numerous windows are knocked out and its
very foundation is cracked, never to be quite the same again.

This all gave way to the mysterious awareness that there was something different
about Felix. In fact, Hampl concluded, “Felix was one of those who pray without
ceasing” (p. 145). As Hampl reﬂected on this observation, she soon decided that both
Felix and Donnie represented in their respective smiles something unique. That
something, she concluded, was the idea that these people felt loved, not because of who
they thought they were or what they did, but simply because they were. In fact, being and
loving were synonymous terms.

But her realization went even further than that. AS she reﬂected on Felix, she
discovered that he was captivated by prayer in much the same way that St. Francis had
been. Felix described prayer as being “crazy,” sort of like being in love . . . only
“crazier.” He started into it and soon discovered he could not get enough of it. He craved
more and more the further he went. In fact, as Hampl reﬂected more and more on both
Felix and the subject of prayer, she soon noticed that Felix reminded her of Donnie. It
was this underlying foundation in both lives that gave them radiance and set them apart
from all others.

As Hampl reﬂected even further, she stated,

There was no dogma to Felix, no rigidity, just the constant feints and lunges of a

man observing the day tirelessly, and living it absolutely as prayer.

Existence was prayer. The day was prayer, and he was in the day, therefore in

prayer. . . . Prayer was not effort, not just something they did. It was something
they were in, as obviously as they were in the world. (p. 147)

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For these peOple, the Church was not life itself; it was just a place. All of its
foibles, peculiarities, shortcomings . . . the Church was not bound by these. Rather, “life
was prayer,” and the goal of living for these people was to reach what Hampl called “the
life of the gaze” (p. 147). This was the same “gaze” she had noticed earlier in her life and
recounted earlier in her autobiography that the nuns at her parochial school exhibited. She
recounted early on that the nuns at her school did not really look at her or at any other
students (p. 65). They had a way of looking beyond them, a way of focusing on reality
beyond the particulars of daily living. In effect, theirs was “the life of the gaze” as well.

A year later, after her trip to Assisi and Lourdes, Hampl traveled to a small
Cictercian woman’s monastery called Rosethom. This was yet another trip orchestrated
by Donnie, undoubtedly knowing full well that Hampl needed to make this trip in order
to bring some form of closure to her pilgrimage. It was during this week-long stay at
Rosethom that it all came together for Hampl. She understood who she was and what she
must do.

The second section, “Miracles or Learning, Meaning, and Connecting,” brought to
life this concept of “the life of the gaze.” The revelatory power in language (Freeman,
1993) was used to shape and give form to Hampl’s experience. By the end of this section,
her story was beginning to take shape and come together. She was beginning to ﬁnd order
by remembering her past (Brady, 1990, p. 46). “Autobiographical learning” (Nelson,
1994, p. 391) was starting to take place as she reﬂected and wrote. But ownership
requires action. Hampl had not yet taken the step that allowed her to appropriate the

learning and understanding that had surfaced so far.

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Silence or Appropriation

The third section of Hampl’s memoir, “Silence,” was the one in which she
claimed ownership of all that she had come to understand and of all she had learned.
During this period, she became much more comfortable with herself and who she was.
She came to view life in general, and hers in particular, as one of contemplation.
Understandings such as “life of the gaze” and “existence is prayer” led her to see and
understand things much differently.

Hampl related her mystical experience, the one she had experienced in the
Hudson Bay store as a child. It was a direct encounter with God, something she knew
within the deep conﬁnes of her being was real. She related it in the following manner:

I reach up to touch the wool. Do touch it. And die. 0r leave my body. Orﬂy.

Something wonderful is happening. What is it? I am also imprinted on the English

downs of the bone-china cup my brother is holding. I am the scuffed wood-plank

ﬂoor. I am the dollar in my pocket. I have left my body. I no longer stop at my

skin. It is the best thing that has ever happened. . . . Then it is over. I snap back. I

am me, I am nothing. We are going out to the car. I am with them again. There ’s

no explaining the most important thing that has ever happened to me. But if I

tried, I would say: You ﬂy, you die. You don 't stop inside, you go everywhere. It 's

heaven. (p. 233)

On Saturday of her week at Rosethom, the small Cistercian woman’s monastery
in the “beautiful nowhere,” Andre the gardener for the grounds captured the essence of
Hampl’s mystical experience and helped her bring her year-long journey to a close. He
recounted an experience with God a friend of his had, a monk who had since died. He
said of the incident:

He got up from his desk, and he went—please, you will excuse me—he went to

pee. At that instant, on the way to pee, he has—but only so brieﬂy—this

experience of God. He never gets it again. He cannot explain it. And this is not
something he can use in a homily, you understand. That is the thing with such
mystical experience. They write in the vemacular—the verna, you remember, this
home-grown language Slave every culture puts to hard labor. They try to express

it. But there’s nothing to be said. He looked right at me, reaching out his hand to
indicate the walls of books that hemmed us in. (p. 234)

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Hampl concluded that language was such a weak instrument to convey the reality
and truth underlying experience. But it is all we have, and we are left with few Options
other than to try to couch and frame these experiences in vernacular that can be shared
with others.

In addition to this realization that language is at best a weak instrument for
conveying the deeper realities of life, Hampl was awakened to the underlying reality of
life as prayer. It was in this last section, ironically entitled “Silence,” that this was made
manifest. It happened on a Wednesday morning as she and others entered the pristine
beauty of the early morning and walked to Morning Praise. She was reﬂecting on some of
Thomas Merton’s work, writing in which he spoke of time and being and the eternity of
the moment. She recounted of Merton,

“For the birds, there is not a time that they tell,” Merton wrote of this moment of

the day, “but the virgin point between darkness and light, between nonbeing and

being . . . when creation in its innocence asks permission to be once again, as it

did on the ﬁrst morning that ever was.” (p. 206)

As she continued to reﬂect and recall speciﬁc instances, she came to the heart of
her memoir. In much the same way that Elijah experienced the Lord in I Kings 19:11-13,
Hampl recognized the “voice” in her own life. Elijah’s experience was recorded as
follows:

The Lord said: “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for

the lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the
rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was
an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came
a ﬁre, but the Lord was not in the ﬁre. And after the ﬁre came a gentle whisper.
When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at
the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here Elijah?” (I Kings
19: 1 1-13 [New International Version])

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The inner voice that spoke to Hampl said, “I can 't help it, it ’s how I am” (p. 207). She
went on to recount this experience in the following manner:

The words could have been “Lord, have mercy,” or “Forgive me, for I have

sinned.” They were those words, in fact, those prayerful words of old, but neatly

camouﬂaged in my modem voice that can’t resist ripping the religious art off the
walls: I can ’t help it, it ’5 how I am. Finally, prayer. After all my running away

from it, and then running after it to Assisi and Lourdes. (p. 208)

This was it. This was the moment where time and being met; the moment when
time ceased to be messy; the time when past, present, and future, became one. In essence,
it was Virgin Time. It was a moment when ultimate learning occurred, a moment when
meaning swept across the human spirit and lodged itself deep within the recesses of the
soul, a moment when the human condition was truly transformed, a moment when
Situation was turned to story (Gomick, 2001b). She continued to recount,

At that moment of saying the words, feeling them course through me like

electrical impulses as unbidden as the synapses of my brain, I understood prayer

is, after all, a plain statement of fact. An admission of existence. That’s all. A

surrender of self to the All of history and oblivion. . . . You don’t get to live

Life—that thing I feared I was missing. You just live a life. This one. (p. 208)

This was that moment when Hampl actually voiced herself into being (Conway,
1998). The narrative and the narrator became one. Nelson (1994) describes this moment
as the time when people “informally and autonomously create meaning for themselves
from their life experience, thereby becoming the authors of both their own life and its
account” (p. 390).

The Berkeley psychology professor said it slightly differently. As Hampl recalled,

The Berkeley psychology professor has been reading The Medieval Imagination

by Le Goff. The point, according to Le Goff, he says, is not that Christianity is

dead or even moribund, but since about 1850 it has not enjoyed the “near
monopoly” it once held “in the realm of ideology.” Like Cecil and Donnie, trying
to turn off the cold shower of dogma. You have to get in there. . . . He makes the

same distinction Felix made in Assisi, though he uses different words: he’s here,
he says, to ﬁnd a contemplative path within his own tradition, not a catechism, not

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even a moral code. “Secular humanism does morality just ﬁne,” he says. “It does
a lot just ﬁne. It just doesn’t give you prayer.” (pp. 223-224)

The last encounter Hampl related was her encounter with Edwina on the last day
of her stay at Rosethom. Hampl attempted to go off on her own to paint with her
watercolors. Hampl was preparing to descend a steep and challenging precipice when
Edwina came over to say her good-byes. Hampl invited Edwina to join her on this
expedition, one that would take them down a steep, rocky path to the ocean ﬂoor. Hampl
described it in the following way:

It was a dizzying drop, the path barely zigzagged; it seemed to shimmy down the

sheer face to a low bulkhead of boulders, giving out ﬁnally to the rare black sand

of the beach and the steady beat of the sea. Easy to imagine your broken body
rolling from boulder to boulder, landing in a crushed heap on the smooth washed

sand. (p. 240)

Edwina confessed she was afraid of heights and did not think she could accept the
challenge. After a considerable amount of verbal exchange, Hampl decided to go ﬁrst.
Edwina never mustered the courage to follow, and Hampl was left to venture on alone.

Upon reaching the ocean, Hampl encountered a dead seal ﬂoating innocently in
the water. This encounter with the black eye holes, the skull as it ﬂoated on the water’s
surface, left her with an uneasiness deep within her being. “Number your days; know that
you will die ” (p. 241), She felt within her being. She attempted to pass this off and return
to her painting, but to no avail. She commented, “Nature was beyond me, and I knew it—
it was too much the real world as we affectionately call it ” (p. 241). She packed her
watercolors and returned to the foot of the cliff she had to scale, only to ﬁnd Edwina
standing at the top. Edwina could have left to return to San Francisco. She could have left

to say her good-byes to others. None of these actions did she take. She waited patiently at

the top for Hampl’s return. After a brief verbal exchange in which Hampl asked Edwina

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if she was ready to accept the challenge and descend, Hampl gave in and exclaimed, “I’m
coming right up” (p. 242).

This was the moment at which the pilgrimage she had decided to undertake more
than a year earlier reached its climax. The people she encountered, the places she visited,
the experiences she had . . . all of these pointed Hampl to the fact that, for her, the
monastery, the cloister she sought, was life itself. She could not escape this
understanding, this awakening that had come to her. At the very end, she was going right
up to enter her Cloister. Her year-long experience had taught her the vows she must take.
She was “coming right up” to take these vows, beginning with an encounter with Edwina.
After a year-long pilgrimage, starting in Assisi and ending at Rosethom, Hampl had
discovered that what Donnie had said at the very beginning was true: “You have to get in
there.”

AS she reﬂected on her experience, Hampl realized her transformation would not
be complete until she took action (Freeman, 1993) and reentered the monastery of life.
She had succeeded in exploring her past, constructing a new and more solid identity, and
now it was time to complete the circle by taking action. Essentially, she appropriated
(Ricoeur, 1991) what it was she had come to learn.

Paramount to her understanding and to this section in particular was her
understanding that life as an observer both could and would not be enough. She must be a
participant in order for it to have any chance of being meaningful in any way. Donnie’s
comment at the very beginning, “You have got to get in there,” proved to be instrumental
in her pilgrimage. Power to “be” and to “get in there” was what she found. Her move to

“get in there” was what ultimately voiced her self into being (Dickerson, 1989).

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Nelson (1994) would have referred to this autobiography as the work of the
imagination to bridge the gap between what Hampl said through her critical reﬂection on

her past experience, and what she now knew (p. 396). “You have to get in there.”

Samuel Heilman: The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Learning and Time

Unlike Hampl, who used her pilgrimage to reﬂect on childhood events and
relationships and how they seemed to take on new meaning and signiﬁcance now that she
was older, Samuel Heilman’s autobiographical process centered on his one-year stay in
Jerusalem. We come to know little about his life as a child or about signiﬁcant
relationships in his life.

Heilman began his narrative by identifying the ultimate antinomy he faced, the
duality of human existence. In one sense, Heilman identiﬁed his attachment to “an eternal
yesterday—a timeless faith and ritual, an ancient system of behavior” (p. 15). In another
sense, he identiﬁed himself as a sociology professor at a university—a time-bound
position in which “what is happening today and tomorrow matters far more than the
verities embedded in the past” (p. 15).

However, this living in two worlds, this “compartmentalization” (p. 16) as he
called it, was far from acceptable. It was a life of denying parts of himself that were vital
to his wholeness and self-esteem. Accepting the challenge of his rabbi, he set out to make
himself whole. As we shall see in the ensuing sections, the process of becoming whole
was one that came about as the result of his reﬂecting and writing about his experience.
In a sense, he voiced himself into existence (Dickerson, 1989) through the process of

writing about his experience in Jerusalem.

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All of the traits of the self-directed learner are here—one who is motivated,
independent, and autonomous. In addition, we will see that, not only were these traits
present when he started, but they remained strong and viable throughout his project. The
inner drive for meaning and understanding served Heilman well throughout his
adventure.

The rabbi of Heilman’s local synagogue continually challenged him to lern, a
word used to describe the ritualistic review and study of the Talmud. For more than a
year, he dodged this challenge. However, something deep inside would not let him go.
This “something” had its genesis in the teaching he had received all his life, which
challenged his concept of “old” versus “new.” As he said, “There is nothing so old that it
cannot be made part of the modern world, no tradition so ancient that it could not be
made a living part of contemporary reality. The old can be made new” (p. 17).

Even though, during his adolescent years, Heilman found the Talmud to be distant
and not very applicable to daily living, he came to the conclusion that the only way to
enter in and become a part of his heritage was through the process of lernen. He had to
become an active participant, not a passive observer, in order to learn and glean from his
heritage. He was now ready to “penetrate that experience” (p. 20). He summarized his
struggle with objectivity and living on the “outside” in the following manner:

I believed, more and more, that it was easier to teach a native how to distance

himself from his own people and way of life and then describe where he had been

than it was to make an outsider fully comprehend what it meant to be a native. . . .

All the time my colleagues worried about “going native,” my constant fear was

“going stranger”—becoming too alienated from my own community and

environment. (p. 23)

It all came to a head one Friday evening at a synagogue service when Heilman’s

rabbi pulled him aside and started talking to him. He spoke of the idea of study as a

vocation, a calling, a way of life (p. 25). He said there was no greater call than the call to

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study the Torah. “No Jew could hope to ﬁnd salvation except by climbing out of the exile
of ignorance and into the redemptive light of lernen. Study was no longer the practice just
of scholars but was for everyone a lifetime mission” (p. 25).

The activity of lernen cannot be engaged in, in isolation. It must be undertaken in
the context of a community. “Members of the chavruse—the study circle—could help
one another reach the heights” (p. 26). Heilman’s challenge was clear. He realized he
must contribute to the building of “the heavenly Jerusalem.” He must do this through the
activity of lernen in the context of a chavruse. He realized that, even if “believing” was
found to be difﬁcult at ﬁrst, the very act of obedience would result in belief.

Early on, Heilman recognized a fundamental but signiﬁcant difference between
learning and lernen. When learning, he was in charge of the learning activities and
process. He set the goals and objectives, and determined the outcomes. When lernen,
however, he was the one being studied. Progress was proportional to the degree to which
he allowed himself to be scrutinized through the lernen process. As he stated so clearly,
“What had begun by engaging the social scientist in me would end by awakening the
Jew” (p. 30).

This was key to his reﬂective, reﬂexive, and reconstructive process, for it showed
him that at least part of the reason behind the schism he was experiencing between sacred
and secular was due to his failure to differentiate knowing from understanding. As an
academic he had been conditioned to see learning as a growth in knowledge and
information. But lernen, as he would come to see, was about interpretation, meaning, and
understanding. It is a difference that pits both possessing against being possessed, and

knowing against understanding.

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All of his life Heilman had been conditioned to think that his being in control, or
having command, of a subject area was evidence of knowing about that subject. Now for
the ﬁrst time, as he took a closer look at Judaism, he began to see that his goal was
understanding of, and not knowledge about, the subject at hand. Learning could give him
knowledge about Judaism, but it took lernen to give him an understanding of Judaism.

This ﬁrst section sets the stage for the remainder of Heilman’s autobiographical
narrative. It is here that we are introduced to a self-directed, self-motivated individual.
The admonition and encouragement of his local rabbi had been gnawing away at him for
quite some time. We see striking similarities to Hampl’s situation in that both felt a
profound sense of conviction that the journey must be undertaken, and a sense of urgency
that it must be undertaken now.

The journey Heilman set before himself was a journey in self-directed learning.
His goal was to force a collapse of this duality of sacred and secular that he was
experiencing. Although he did not look forward with a plan of clearly delineated learning
objectives, he was looking back, as he wrote, in an effort to capture what it was he had
learned. And he was doing this through the mechanism of narrative.

The task he set for himself was to look back on his time in Jerusalem, and through
a process of reﬂection and interpretation, attempt to construct what it was that he had
learned. He began by looking at the concept of time and the role it played in his life.
Upon arriving in Jerusalem, Heilman’s ﬁrst stop was a section of town called Shaarey
Chesed, literally “gates of kindness” (p. 39).

Time here seemed transformed as well. It was not just that I had left the Jerusalem

of the nineteen eighties outside and entered what appeared to be the world of

prewar Eastern Europe, but more. Even the speciﬁc time inside seemed different.

On the wall across from me were two clocks resting on a handsomely carved
shelf. These were old pendulum clocks, with Roman numerals on their faces. But

70

one had the time set according to the watch on my wrist and a second, identical in
every respect, was set at twelve. (p. 43)

Within the context of this chavruse, Heilman began to experience transformation,
a transformation of both time and person. It was here that Heilman encountered “the
Maggid” (p. 49), a master storyteller. The Maggid was one who was able to weave
history and tradition together in a meaningful manner. Heilman said of him:

He was a master storyteller, an actor who animated his stories with heart-cries of

“Oy-yoy” that could make even the most hardened cosmopolitan into a parochial

who yearned for the world of the bes medresh [House of Jewish study] and a past

that was part of the traditional Jewish consciousness he thought he had long ago

abandoned. (p. 49)

Heilman’s personal transformation continued as the group within which he had
located himself began to recite the Kriyat Shma, the Jewish credo of faith. In the Jewish
faith, this is one of the central articles of prayer (p. 50). As Heilman listened to what was
happening around him, he found that

it was not long before I began to lose myself in prayer and recited these familiar

words of the Shma with an attachment that I had not had since those days in

grammar school when the ﬁrst conscious motives of prayer invaded my
adolescence. . . . That I could still be so moved by old prayers was a surprise to
me. To be sure, I had always told people that that was why I prayed. But now

what had been simply a logical argument became a psychological reality. (p. 52)
But this “psychological reality” became even more prevalent as he experienced the power
available through the very act of praying. As he observed further, “It occurred to me then,
as never before, that some people prayed not so much to their God as for themselves—for
the transformative power of prayer itself” (p. 53).

Another observation Heilman made was related to the concept of community.
During the activity of prayer, he noticed that each person waited for the previous person

to stop praying before he or she started. In a sense, they “fed” each other by the very act

of praying. He said of this,

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In this race to be last, each man seemed to be playing it his own way. Yet each
seemed authentically to be on the track as it had been laid down. As I observed
one, I was sure that he deserved to be waited for. But then I looked to the other
and knew that he was the one. And while neither seemed conscious of the other,
there was no doubt in my mind that neither could have gone on without the other.

(pp. 54-55)

Although the efﬁciency and efﬁcacy of prayer acquired new meaning and
signiﬁcance for Heilman, how it was they appeared to be efﬁcient and efﬁcacious
remained a mystery until he awoke to how it was he learned. The learning he was doing,
or more precisely that was happening to him and in him, was happening with the help of
his imagination. He said of this,

I had to learn exactly what sacriﬁces could and could not be brought, who would

have to bring them and precisely how they were to be handled. But all this was

not to be a part of some lessons to be intellectually assimilated. Rather, the

learning I did came in through the imagination. (p. 61)

This was a major breakthrough in the life of Heilman. For an academic trained in
the social sciences, where observation, data collection, and cognitive processing are
worshiped and revered, to admit that the imagination was a legitimate channel of learning
was no small admission. But this breakthrough, this enlightenment, was just the
beginning of a major transformation in his life.

After imagination, the next ingredient Heilman found necessary to his
transformational mix was memory. During the heat of Talmudic discussion, he found
himself “gone from the present but not yet having arrived in the past” (p. 62). This was
truly signiﬁcant as he discovered he was hopelessly trapped in time, his own time. Others
seemed able to travel back in time and avoid this trap. But it was not intuitively Obvious
to him how to do this. And then it happened. He discovered what it was that was missing.

Everything that transpired, or had transpired previously, had done so in the present tense.

He said of this discovery,

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Everything had been spoken in the present tense. . . . They were not just citing
divergent texts; they were almost composing them afresh. . . . Instead, it had all
the freshness and novelty of the original decision. . . . Only if I allowed myself to

see the old as if it were fresh and new could I too share in the delight, could I

come to care about sacriﬁces at the Temple. (p. 65)

The Shaarey Chesed experience was necessary but not sufﬁcient for Heilman’s
growth in understanding. It started him on his pilgrimage, one he knew he must continue,
but somewhere else. He had received as much as he could from this environment. No
more was possible. The reasons for this he cited as being endemic to himself, the person
he was. When the “pinch of snuff” (p. 66) was given to him, he realized he had
penetrated the inner circle. No small accomplishment! But he went on to say, “ I never
quite got over a sense of distance from the text” (p. 66). Why was that?

Heilman cited several reasons for these limitations. First, he felt the limitations of
his imagination (p. 66). Try as he might, he could not get over images of slaughterhouses,
when it came to attempting to visualize rituals and procedures related to sacriﬁces. Those
in his circle seemed to visualize this temple scene in much more inspiring ways, but not
Heilman. Second, there was the limitation related to the use of Yiddish. Although he was
conversant in and with the language, Heilman found it difﬁcult to keep up with those who
were ﬂuent in it. And ﬂuency was an undesignated requirement for full and complete
understanding of this particular chavruse experience. Finally, the whole concept of time
was a limitation Heilman could not overcome. As he stated just before he left, “They
dealt in etemities; I was stuck in the present” (p. 68).

However, what he received from and through this experience changed him
forever. This change was a change in the way in which be viewed and experienced

prayer. He stated at the end of this experience, “To be sure, I had been changed by the

Shaarey Chesed experience. My prayers were now slower-paced, and I stopped to think

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about the meaning of all the words I used. No longer could I rush through the liturgy as I
had done on that ﬁrst night” (p. 68).

Reﬂecting on his experience at this chavruse provided Heilman with a much
greater understanding of two critical factors in the learning process—imagination and
memory (Brady, 1990; Freeman, 1993; Nelson, 1994). He realized for the ﬁrst time the
transforrnative power inherent in a story, especially when told by a masterful storyteller.
What he also recognized from and through this experience was that learning, meaningful
learning, had an imaginative dimension to it (Dirkx, 1997). It was this imaginative
dimension that was needed in order to “voice himself into being” (Dickerson, 1989) and
overcome the constraints of temporality.

We will see in the next section that Heilman uncovered a vast difference between
learning and lernen. As I mentioned above, learning as an end put him in control. Lernen

as a means asked for his control.

The Roles of Learning and Lernen

In the previous section, we saw how Heilman interpreted his chavruse experience
and what he learned through it. Seeing that the roles of the imagination, memory, and
time were vital to his understanding and formation, he proceeded to use them as he
encountered the real meaning underlying learning.

During the course of his stay in Jerusalem, Heilman had an encounter with the
men of Mea Shearim. It was here that Heilman met Reb Yosef Moshe, who serves as his
guide, a sort of facilitator with respect to the happenings at Mea Shearim. It is important
to remember that, at this point in his journey into and through Jerusalem, Heilman had a
growing desire to engage in the process of lernen. But Heilman interpreted this to be a

process of studying sacred texts. Everyone he had met or seen so far had dedicated

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themselves to this process of studying. And more often than not, it was carried out in the
midst of volumes of other texts—commentaries and. expository texts related to the Torah.
Enter Reb Yosef Moshe.

Reb Yosef Moshe opened Heilman’s eyes to a fundamental understanding of what
lernen was all about. He told him that the secret to lernen did not lie in Heilman’s efforts
to “grab hold” of the text. Rather, the secret lay in the text’s ability to “grab hold” of him.
He told him, “You see, it’s the same with a sefer. A holy book can be worn, its pages torn
along the edges, the binding not so good. But the light inside it can still shine brightly if
you know how to lern it out” (p. 98).

Essentially, the light and life, or equivalently the meaning, of the text could be
brought out through the process of lernen. The process was not one of coming to know
more about a particular subject, although that undoubtedly did occur. Rather, the process
resulted in an encounter with the text, more of a deep inner connection. Reb Yosef Moshe
told Heilman, “Heaven forbid. But you must buy not to possess but in order to become
possessed. You must buy those books which you wish and are able to enter” (p. 99).

After saying this, Reb Yosef Moshe took Heilman to a bookstore owned and
operated by Mr. Mintzer. In the midst of Mr. Mintzer’s world of books, Heilman
stumbled across a book that contained a partial commentary on Genesis 25, verse 26. The
commentary states, “And after that his brother emerged, and his hand was grasping
the heel of Jacob. Why was he grasping? This comes to teach us that the kingdom of
Jacob does not begin until the rule of the kingdom of Esau comes to an end” (p. 105).
Heilman went on to say,

I looked around me in this little cellar room, surrounded by the wisdom of

generations of believing Jews. These books must surely now constitute the

kingdom of Jacob. As I stood in Mintzer’s cellar, it struck me that until now I had
spent most of my life within the domains of Esau’s kingdom and the only way

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that I could ever allow the kingdom of Jacob to begin was to free myself from the

domination of Western and Christian ideas. . . . I would have to plunge into the

world that until now I had only been visiting. (p. 105)

Here was further reinforcement to Heilman’s growing awareness that
understanding is built on the foundation of involvement. As Donnie told Hampl, “You
have to get in there.” So too, Heilman must “get in there” in order to understand. At this
point in his pilgrimage he was sent to his next “station.”

What we see beginning to happen is a complete remaking of a self called
Heilman. Seeing that understanding depends on the imagination and the memory, he now
came to learn that there is a vast and signiﬁcant difference between “learning” and
“lernen.” Lernen is much more a state of being, a mode of active learning, of getting
involved and struggling with a text. The goal is not for the learner to acquire new or more
knowledge, but rather for the learner to be acquired, taken over by the text. This
represented a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of being for Heilman.

Brady (1990) said that autobiography is the process of reconstructing the unity of
life across time. For Heilman, this was demonstrated by his growth in understanding as
he moves from station to station. At this next “station” Heilman, was challenged to
rethink the value and role of studying and learning in an individual life. In a conversation
Heilman had regarding the value of a university education, he quoted Menachem
Reichler as saying,

You acquired a great deal: you learned nothing. If you have come to acquire

Torah as if it were one of the subjects you learned in the university, you will

never learn it. The Torah is the way to reach the Master of the Universe. It is a
pathway, not an acquisition. You will never ﬁnish it; you will never get a degree.

(p. 117)

Through this Heilman was encouraged not to confuse the ends with the means.

Study of the Torah was a means to an end, it was not the end itself. Heilman recognized

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his confusion about the terms pathway and acquisition. Menachem Reichler also helped
him see the difference between the inner and the outer heart.

Are these obstacles? You have said yourself that you wish to be searched. You

know that there are two ways of saying “my heart”: “Ieb "’ and “Ievavi.” The ﬁrst

refers to the outer heart, the sort we show to one another, the one from which the
love of one man for another can come. But “levavi,” the heart of which the
psalmist writes, is the inner heart, the one into which the‘love of God may reach.

That is what must be puriﬁed. (p. 118)

Menachem further said,

You are right: you must not lern Torah alone. The Rebbe also taught us that there

is a soul in the world through which all interpretations of the Torah are revealed.

That is the soul of the teacher. But to ﬁnd a teacher whose soul can be attached to

your own, you must ﬁnd out ﬁrst what is the character of your own soul—and that

is not easy, because, as the Rebbe explained, anyone who wishes to understand

the Torah must bring forth an interpretation from his own heart. (p. 120)

During the course of his journey, Heilman entered into the synagogue of the
Bratslaver Hasidim, in an attempt to ﬁnd Menachem Reichler. While waiting for him to
appear, Heilman wandered among the vast volumes of books and began to immerse
himself in the teachings of those books. It was not long before he found himself in a
circle in which someone was reading text from Reb Nahman’s stories. He was captivated
when he heard this reader read the text, “If you believe yourself capable of destruction,
then believe you are capable of repair” (p. 127). Heilman went on to say,

The line from the text startled me from my reverie. I thought I hadn’t been

listening or following, and suddenly here was something that had penetrated my

consciousness. I hadn’t meant to do so, but almost instinctively I responded: “And

how does one carry out the repair? (p. 127)

The reader’s response to this question was, “It depends what it is that one needs to
repair—himself or the world? Repair, however, must always begin with the person

himself, for only when we are all repaired and made whole can we hope to make over the

world” (p. 128).

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The reader went on to explain that sometimes this process of repair is one of
growing, and at other times it is one of diminishing. He said, ”So you see, for some
people repair requires them to shrink from what they have been before the holy spirit can
enter them, while others must ﬁll themselves up slowly and gradually from the fountain
of Torah until they have grown sufﬁciently” (p. 130).

All of this began to settle onto and into Heilman. This idea of “repairing” and
“ﬁlling,” taken together with his renewed interest in prayer and community, resulted in
an internal light being pointed in the direction he must take. Now it was up to him to take
it.

One of the key events on which Heilman reminisced was the celebration of the
Sabbath. On the Jewish calendar this is the height of the week, a day of joy and
celebration. It was an acquaintance of his from the United States who told him where to
go to experience a “lively” celebration.

Heeding the wisdom in his friend’s advice Heilman traveled to this “lively”
celebration. Nahman was the name of the man, or cantor, who led the time of worship.
He literally became a different person when worship began. He was changed,
transformed, and carried away. Heilman described him in the following manner: “He
seemed to have become transformed. No longer aware of anyone around him, he closed
his eyes and then opened them to focus off into the middle distance. I saw that he was
seeing something that I could not myself see—at least, not yet” (p. 138).

A new way had been deﬁned. Greater understanding had begun to take place. A
map of sorts had been developed. But the act Of appropriation had yet to be undertaken.

Heilman saw people who had lost themselves in the search for meaning and signiﬁcance.

78

As he reﬂected and wrote, he recognized that although this “new way” seemed to serve
others, it was not his possession.

It was experiencing the Sabbath that started to bring it all together for Heilman.
He recognized the intensity of this conﬂict between observer and participant, and
between the social scientist and the Jew. The role of the observer and the social scientist
were really means of avoiding what was meaningful and signiﬁcant.

Heilman proceeded to describe the turmoil beginning to take place deep within
the recesses of his soul. It was the struggle between observer and participant, between the
social scientist and the Jew. He said of this turmoil,

The neshama yetara, that extra soul one is supposed to acquire on the Sabbath,

was struggling to come out. . . . I thought for a moment about something I had

once read somewhere about entities in this world which act upon us but which we
do not recognize because we have never bothered to encounter them face to face.

. . . My talent for turning myself into an observer, one who would distance

himself from the action, was, I supposed, a way to prevent myself from having to

see or feel this sort of thing. (p. 139)

Through this experience, the celebration of the Sabbath, the experience of
“hearing in these prayers words I had not ever heard so clearly” (p. 140), Heilman was
brought face to face with the Sabbath in a way he never before had experienced. He had
celebrated the Sabbath before; that was not the issue. The issue was, he never had
celebrated in this way. This had opened his eyes and forced him to look at the
quintessential question, “Who am 1?” He said of this experience, “The people around me
now looked different too. Nahman had peeled back their veneers to reveal another aspect.
I had been wrong. They were not at all like me—at least, not now. Or maybe I wasn’t
who I thought I was” (p. 141). We begin to see that, through the construction of this

narrative, his self-identity began to change (Eakin, 1999) and the struggle within began to

ﬁnd expression as he reﬂected and wrote even more.

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This struggle with the two ultimate questions any of us face—Who am I? and
What is real?——led Heilman back to Menachem for further consultation. In his residence,
Menachem took Heilman through a series of questions in an effort to bring closure to this
self-directed learning activity Heilman had undertaken. But, as in any valuable learning
experience, the closure was something only Heilman could bring to and on himself.
Heilman began by relating to Menachem his (Heilman’s) desire to ﬁnd a chavruse
and to engage in the activity of lernen. Part of the path to ﬁnding these ends was to locate
the proper teacher. Heilman said, “But you told me that only if I discovered the character
of my heart of hearts would I be able to ﬁnd the proper teacher” (p. 156). Menachem’s
response was, “And did I say I would do that for you? Did I not tell you that you had to
take in the burning coals of Torah in order to purify yourself? Did you do that?” (p. 156).
The light in Heilman’s heart was beginning to ﬂicker. In a certain sense,
Menachem had allowed Heilman to undergo a variety of chavruse experiences in an
attempt to bring to light the fact that this pilgrimage was his and his alone. He, Heilman,
must undertake lernen of his own accord. Menachem ended their time together by
relaying a sort of parable to Heilman. He told him the story of a man who visited
Rizhyner Rebbe in search of wisdom related to the “light” he felt when he studied and the
lack of this “light” when he stopped. Rizhyner Rebbe’s response was,
That is just as when a man walks through the woods on a dark night, and for a
time another joins him, lantern in hand, but at the crossroads they part and the
ﬁrst must grope his way on alone. But if a man carries his own light with him, he
need not be afraid of any darkness. Do you understand? It is time for you to stop
looking for someone else to lead you, for someone else’s lantern. You must at last
learn to study on your own. (p. 158)
Ownership. This is what he lacked. All of his life had been spent looking for

someone else to aid in his discovery process. It was time to take up the mantle on his own

and make his faith his own. Life is a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, and of

80

trying to make sense of and derive meaning from past experience. But these processes do
not produce change or transformation until people exert their will and take action on what
it is they think they have learned (Brady, 1990; Nelson, 1994). This is where the world

turned to word is acted upon (Freeman, 1993).

Learning Through Appropriation

It ﬁnally came together for Heilman as he reﬂected on his last days in Jerusalem.
He had allowed himself to become a participant. Now he had to return home, thereby
taking up the role of an observer once again. Heilman’s ultimate struggle with the
observer-participant dichotomy occurred on his trip on bus number 9. He said early on,

In each neighborhood, the people getting on and off the bus change. And if one

allows himself to become imaginatively transformed with each tum—to become,

as I did on occasion, a part of what he observes—the ride can be a sort of spiritual
journey through Jewish life. Today I had joined the tour in the precincts of

Orthodoxy and allowed myself to be taken away to another domain. (p. 162)

Reading Heilman’s description of this journey leaves the reader feeling as though
he or she is watching Waiting for Godot. In a sense, Heilman was waiting for something,
but he did not truly know what that something was. He said , “And like the old folks of
Bukhara, I also waited for the great salvation that was to come—although just what sort
of salvation would save the likes of me I did not really know” (p. 162).

He thought the answer might be in the midst of the “right” chavruse, but he was
never able to ﬁnd the “right” one. He thought the answer might be in books, but he
ﬁnally realized that “this time the library would not steady me” (p. 163). He went on to
say,

These books mainly told one how to deal with “going native”; but what I had

always feared might happen had now begun to happen: I was “going stranger.”

My journey to Jerusalem in the footsteps of Yochanan be Zakkai, I had believed,

would enable me to share in an experience that had always remained on the
periphery of my life. I had not, however, expected to be swallowed up by it

81

completely—to become only a participant; but neither had I supposed I would

have to escape to the distance of being purely an observer. Yet now I could

neither ﬁnd my way in, nor could I any longer tolerate being outside. (p. 163)

This is where his situation became his story; where the narrator became the
author. Heilman realized the irony and the antinomy inherent in living. He could not get
inside, nor could he tolerate being outside the community. This was the tension that
created a story out of his situation.

Things ﬁnally came together for Heilman when he met Ian, a gentleman who
worked for the bank, performing currency exchange functions. Ian invited Heilman to
Heichal Baruch, his chavruse. It was there that Heilman’s struggle with various
dichotomies, observer-participant, native-stranger came together. Several things the ray
said during Heilman’s involvement there brought light to his situation. During one
session the ray said, “Gentlemen. This is not an easy piece of Gemara. We must struggle
to give it meaning” (p. 176). Struggle for meaning; this was at the core of his pilgrimage.
In addition, he discovered it was through the use of metaphor that this meaning could be
found and that he could bridge the gap between his two worlds—the world of the Jew and
the world of the university professor.

Heilman’s sense of conﬁdence grew when he was asked to comment on some
text. His comment, “The commentaries of the Tosphot explain that he who does not learn
the Oral Tradition will be buried by the dense weight of Scripture” (p. 183), revealed
much of what happened to him while in Jerusalem. The rav summed it up when he said,
“The Talmud, gentlemen, is our Jewishness; it is our mark of distinction, the emblem of

our understanding. We do not lern Gemara simply to acquire knowledge; we do it to

preserve our Jewish lives” (p. 184).

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All of Heilman’s steps in self-directed learning could take him only so far. He
came to understand the role and importance of the chavruse, of lernen, and of the
Talmud. But only he as a Jew had access to the mantle, and this was something that he
had to don for himself. Self—directed learning activities could not give him understanding,
an inner awareness of the truth. He had to come by this on his own. And ﬁnally, as
Menachem reminded him, it was not about possessing the knowledge contained in books.
Rather it is “about people who are possessed by their books” (p. 193). “How much of the
Talmud has gone through you?” (p. 195).

Brunet (1995) claimed there is no such thing as a life as lived. All is a
reconstruction from past events and experiences. McAdams (1996), Freeman (1993), and
others would concur with Brunet on this subject. What is real is the reconstruction and
interpretation. Authentic selﬂiood is deﬁned in this manner.

The “autobiographical process” (Brunet, 1995) is a means of regaining authority
over an individual life (Brady, 1990). To allow oneself to become imaginatively
transformed, that iS the secret. But we must acknowledge that it is not a once-and-for-all
event. Rather, it is a continual struggle both to ﬁnd and to gain meaning. The role of
imagination was best described by Nelson (1994) when he said, “Imagination functions
in knowing as a persistent questioning of all that mismatches between what we see in our
critical reﬂection on experience and what we usually name as what we know” (p. 396).
This is a process that requires planting before there is harvesting. Menachem said it well.

“According to the effort is the reward” (Heilman, p. 195).

Swarm

In both autobiographies, the writers made their discoveries through critical

reﬂection on past experiences (Brady, 1990; Brunet, 1995; Mezirow, 1990, 1991; Nelson,
83

1994) and then conveyed these discoveries through the mechanism of language. The
revelatory power inherent in language (Freeman, 1993), together with its ability to create
“Shades of deeper meaning” (Gomick, 2001a) and to unveil “inner plots” (Conway,
1998), was used to transform the writers’ lives. Both authors created dialogue destined
for speciﬁc ears, ears that could relate to these experiences. Lejeune (1989) referred to
this as a pact. Robinson (1998) created a slightly different image in an essay on the
subject of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this essay she stated,

Theology may proceed in the manner of a philosophical treatise or a piece of

textual criticism, but it always begins by assuming major terms. And all of them,

being imbedded in Scripture and tradition, behave altogether differently from
discursive language. To compound the problem, Christian thinkers since Jesus
have valued paradox as if it were resolution. So theology is never ﬁnally anything
but theology, words about God, proceeding from the assumptions that God exists
and that we know about him in a way that allows us to speak about him.

Bonhoeffer calls these truths of the church “a word of recognition among

friends.” He invokes this language of recognition and identiﬁcation in attempting

to make the church real and aware of itself, with all that implied when he wrote.

For him word is act. And, for him, it was. (p. 117)

Hampl and Heilman both wrote as though they were engaged in “a word of
recognition among friends.” Each drew on traditions, images, symbols, and language
speciﬁc to both their religious backgrounds and their groups of “friends.” Their styles
were casual, and their intention was not to convince or argue but rather to discuss and to
share discoveries they had made with whoever wanted to listen. Each performed the act
of converting the world into word in order to act upon it (Freeman, 1993).

The story that resulted for both Hampl and Heilman was one of discovery, of
growth in understanding of themselves and others, and of the development of deeper
meanings into the activities and interactions of their respective lives. Their goal was not

so much to rewrite their respective pasts (Freeman, 1993) as it was to unify their

respective worlds, to collapse the sacred and the secular into one, to provide some sense

84

of order to their lives (Brady, 1990). Neither writer had any idea what to expect from
such an undertaking. There was no outline, no set of learning objectives to be met, no
goals to strive for, no plans to follow. Yet, the end result was a changed life, a change in
perspective, a deeper understanding (Dickerson, 1989).

Certainly we could argue that this undertaking by both Hampl and Heilman was
an undertaking in self-directed learning. Knowles (1975) described self-directed learning
in the following manner:

In its broadest meaning, “self-directed learning” describes a process in which

individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing

their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material

resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies,
and evaluating learning outcomes. Other labels found in the literature to describe

” ‘6'

this process are “self-planned learning, Inquiry method,” “independent

learning,” “self-education,’ “self-instruction,” “self-teaching,” “self-study,” and

“autonomous learning.” (p. 18)

We saw in these autobiographies how a self could voice itself into being
(Gomick, 2001a) through the “autobiographical process” (Brunet, 1995). Corrections
were made, meaning was established, and learning transpired, all as a result of
remembering, reﬂecting, and rewriting (Brady, 1990; Brunet, 1995; Freeman, 1993;
McAdams, 1993; Merriam & Clark, 1993; Nelson, 1994).

But what these writers did and what happened to them, while self-directed for all
intents and purposes, was not adequately characterized by self-directed learning theory
alone. In a sense we might say that self-directed learning theory is necessary, but not
sufﬁcient, to the descriptive process.

So what else is needed? The answer to this question comes from the realm of
autobiographical theory, particularly as it pertains to what I have chosen to call the

“autobiography as linguistic construction of the self” and “autobiography as a means of

adult learning and transformation.”

85

Learning for both Heilman and Hampl took place in very similar fashions. Both
writers went away from their respective homes. They returned to the historical location of
their respective faith communities, and wrote about their experience. In particular, both
writers walked away from their autobiographies with a deeper understanding of, and
appreciation for, two fundamental realities. These fundamental realities were (a) the
reality that active involvement is the key to greater understanding and (b) the reality of
the efﬁcacy of prayer.

Comments Heilman made that support this idea of involvement include the
following:

AS I stood in Mintzer’s cellar, it struck me that until now I had spent most of my

life within the domains of Esau’s kingdom and the only way that I could ever

allow the kingdom of Jacob to begin was to free myself from the domination of

Western and Christian ideas. . . . I would have to plunge into the world that until

now I had only been visiting. (p. 105)

The idea of “plunging” into this new world was corroborated by Rizhyner Rebbe
when he said, “Do you understand? It is time for you to stop looking for someone else to
lead you, for someone else’s lantern. You must at last learn to study on you own” (p.
158). “Plunging into the world,” “getting in there,” and “learning to study on your own”
all point to the extreme signiﬁcance of becoming involved. Transformation and learning
are dependent on this action. Hampl articulated this need for involvement, and in so
doing spoke for both herself and Heilman when she said, “I knew that I must set out on
the trail. That, too, was instinct: I didn’t know how to think about the past without going
somewhere” (p. 56).

In a very real sense for both of these writers, it was the act of creating their

individual autobiographies that made them different, that transforms them and helped

them see life in a new and different way. This process is what Freeman (1993) called

86

“rewriting” the self. Dickerson (1989) referred to it as a process of composing, the end
result being to establish “shades of deeper meaning” (p. 140).

Finally, both Hampl and Heilman talked about the role of the imagination in their
learning and creating processes. When Alma asked whether she wrote from her life or
from her imagination, Hampl responded, “I write from my life and from imagination.
That’s what it is to write about—or from—the past. No doubt I write about the past
because I want it to be the past” (p. 55). She proceeded to talk about reaching into her
past and dusting off old relics to see what they held for her. For her, narrative formation
was an interaction among memory, imagination, and language.

Heilman made a similar discovery and admission when he said, “But all this was
not to be a part of some lessons to be intellectually assimilated. Rather, the learning I did
came in through the imagination”(p. 61). For him as well, the interaction of memory,
imagination, and language resulted in the discovery of an inner life plot (Conway, 1998)
and the formation of a personal narrative.

In this chapter, we explored learning that occurred in the lives of two authors as a
result of their religious pilgrimages. According to Dahlgren (1984), when people learn
something they have grasped its meaning. When they verbalize the meaning, they
transform it into knowledge (Jarvis, 1992). People make meaning of an experience by
interpreting it, and when they use the interpretation to guide decision making or action,
the meaning-making becomes learning (Mezirow, 1990a, 1990b).

In the cases of both Hampl and Heilman, the process of interpreting previous
experience(s) led to learning, or equivalently meaning-making (Mezirow, 1991). In each
case, understanding of the sacred and the secular was brought closer to being one and the

same. In the next chapter we will look at learning that leads to a greater understanding of

87

living in the autobiographies of two people who dealt with major, debilitating illness in

their lives.

88

CHAPTER 3

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF ILLNESS

Introduction
This chapter explores learning that occurred in the lives of two authors as the
result of writing about their experience with illness. Two additional autobiographical
accounts are used in this exploration. The ﬁrst is An Unguiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods

and Madness by Kay Redﬁeld Jamison. This is a narrative account of one person’s

 

journey to acknowledge and accept the fact that she did indeed suffer from bi-polar
disorder, a disease She inherited from her father. But more than this, it is an account of
someone’s realizing that this disease deﬁned who she was, and learning to accept this.
The second autobiography is A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healirg by Reynolds
Price. This is a narrative account of one person’s struggle with cancer. It was a struggle
he did not choose, yet it was a struggle from which he discovered a new life, one that
bore little resemblance to the old.

I summarize the story underlying each autobiography, drawing special attention to
times and substance of learning. At the end of each autobiographical section, I provide a
summary of the lessons each author learned through his or her unique self-directed
learning process. The ﬁnal section is a brief summary of the chapter.

Illness is a subject well suited for the self-directed learner and autobiographical
narrative. Caffarella (1994) related her experience with breast cancer and how her role as
a self-directed learner helped her navigate the learning process itself and grow in her

awareness and understanding of the illness. She claimed to have learned three

89

fundamental truths from this experience. All of these truths closely paralleled those
experienced by the authors I selected for this study.

Caffarella’s ﬁrst claim was that “pain, both physical or emotional, can serve as a
contradictory force in the learning process” (p. 7). As such it served as a motivator,
propelling her to learn more about her condition. Second, she claimed that “having as
much information as possible was critical for me to make sound decisions” (p. 7).
Decision making is ﬁrmly grounded on the assumption that the decision maker has
adequate information upon which to base a decision. Finally, she said, “I learned that
learning in adulthood does not usually happen in a vacuum” (p. 7). People were
instrumental in encouraging her, directing her, and answering her questions.

All in all, narrative is a valuable and viable instrument for the process of learning
from and through personal experience. F allot (1998) showed the effect narrative can and
does have in the process of recovering from mental illness. Narrative is instrumental in
the structuring of human experience.

The stories people tell about their lives call attention to the need to make sense

of—to discover or construct meaning in response to—life events and

circumstances. Personal narratives have the power not only to disclose the
individual’s core values and implicit philosophies but to shape ongoing life

activities—to open up some possibilities and to constrict others. (p. 35)

Kay Redﬁeld Jamison and Reynolds Price demonstrated how this is accomplished.

Kay Redﬁeld Jamison: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Preparation for Learning or a Story Must Be Told
Kay Redﬁeld Jamison’s situation was signiﬁcantly different from that of
Reynolds Price. Whereas Price was coming to grips both with a disease state he had and

with the changes it had wrought in his life, Jamison was dealing with a disease State she

90

had. Her maniac-depressive illness (MDI) was intrinsic to her human condition. She
would never be free from it. Essentially, it deﬁned who she was.

“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you ﬁrst must make it
beautiful,” Jamison wrote (p. 5). By writing this autobiography, Jamison accomplished
this objective. She faced her “beast,” wrestled with it, and in the end she made it
beautiful. For her, the act of writing was the act of wrestling. And the result was the
creation of a new story, a rewritten self (Freeman, 1993).

Jamison wrote as an outside observer looking back over the course of her life in
an attempt to ﬁt the pieces together and to make sense of it. She covered a lot of ground
in a short amount of time. We are told about her life as though Sgt. Friday from the
classic TV Show Dragnet were asking the questions: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Save for
one signiﬁcant relationship, associations with other people do not play a signiﬁcant part
in Jamison’s story. This may be due in part to the nature of her debilitating disease.
Depression in all its forms is a battle with isolation, loneliness, and self-centeredness. The
victim ceases to participate in life and instead becomes an isolated observer.

The autobiography is descriptive in nature. Large expanses of time are covered in
just a few pages. Jamison pulled no punches in the language she used. Terms she used to
describe herself include madness and psychotic. Language was much more a tool than it
was an art form for her. She was a psychiatrist by training and consequently tended to
write as an objective observer, even if the subject was her own life. She did not attempt to
reconstruct conversations or scenes in an attempt to help herself better understand events.

Jamison acknowledged up front that for ten years she had sensed something was
wrong, but she did not seek any sort of help in attempting to understand what was wrong.

In a sense, this autobiography fulﬁlled two purposes. One purpose was to help Jamison

91

avoid repeating the same mistake, which was remaining Silent when she had a story to
tell. The second was to derive meaning from her experience by writing about it.

Jamison said at the very beginning,

I have no idea what the long-terrn effects of discussing such issues so openly will

be on my personal and professional life, but, whatever the consequences, they are

bound to be better than continuing to be silent. I am tired of hiding, tired of
misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as

though I have something to hide. (p. 7)

This was her acknowledgement that She must make the beast beautiﬁil; she had no
alternative. In a sense She was fulﬁlling what Palmer (2000) called her “vocation.” She
acknowledged there was a gap between herself and her true authentic self. The very act of
writing was what she did to make the beast beautiful and to bridge this gap. She took as
her starting point Robert Lowell’s essential question, “Yet why not say what happened?”
(11 8).

Jamison was born and raised in a military family. Her father was a career Air
Force ofﬁcer, ﬁrst and foremost a scientist, secondarily a jet pilot. She began her
narrative by reminiscing about a plane crash that took the life of its pilot. One day, out of
nowhere, a plane ﬂew devastatingly close to the playground of the elementary school she
was attending. All of the children in her class ran outside, only to see the plane crash and
explode in a huge ball of ﬂames. For Jamison, the pilot became a hero. The explosion and
ensuing death of the pilot seemed to implant within her a sense of duty and helped her
realize that duty and meaning are closely related. Ideals, goals, and duty all came together
for her at an early age and seemed to provide the basic “nutrients” for her growth in the

years to come. The irony in all of this was that the pilot’s loss of life seemed to Open her

eyes to the reality of death and helped make it a constant companion throughout her life.

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Jamison saw herself as fairly well adjusted, happy, and the possessor of many
friends in her growing-up years. She noted that when both she and her sister were forced
to deal with their respective psychological demons, her sister saw these demons as being
internal to herself, part and parcel of her life, her family, and her world. Jamison, on the
other hand, saw her demon, MDI, as being external to herself, something at war with her
true self. This difference in perspective seemed to be instrumental in Jamison’s ability to
come to grips with her disease and tell her story. She set out on a journey of sorts to tell
the story of her battle with MDI. She ended up acknowledging that MDI was very much a
part of who She was, and she learned to accept this. She made the beast beautiful.

Part of the reason, and undoubtedly a very large part, Jamison was able to deal
with her MDI was her relationship with her mother. She described her mother in the
following fashion: “My mother . . . was always the one my friends wanted to Sit down
and talk with: we played with my father; we talked with my mother” (p. 17). Her
mother’s belief that “it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them”
proved to be signiﬁcant in Jamison’s battle with MDI and her survival over the
subsequent decades. She described generations on her mother’s side as being people who
were “reliable, stable, honorable, and saw things through” (p. 19). Jamison built on this
foundation and further described her mother as one who could “love and learn, listen and
change” (p. 19). This ability of her mother, coupled with her desire to never give up, was
the driving force behind Jamison’s ability to ﬁght her MDI.

In this section Jamison identiﬁed a compelling reason or force that was driving
her to tell her story (McAdams, 1993, 1996) and create her narrative (Brunet, 1987, 1995,
1999). It was something that demanded her attention and would not let her alone until She

acted on it.

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Learning Through Change

AS Jamison developed her autobiography, she began to understand why she was
the way she was. Family background, genetic links, geographical movement, and the
actual experience of MDI episodes all came together to help her deﬁne who she was.

Jamison provided a brief glimpse into her background and the changes that
happened to her and around her as she grew up. AS she looked back over her life, she
focused on herself at the age of 15, as the time when things began to change. Her father
decided to leave the Air Force and head off into industry. This necessitated moving from
Washington, DC, to southern California. Jamison found herself in a new environment
and was extremely unhappy. It was during this period that she noticed several things.
First, although they were living together, her parents were essentially estranged (p. 34).
In addition, she began to see her father’s struggles with moods and what she called the
“blackness of depression” (p. 34). Finally, as she watched her father Struggle with these
black moods, She discovered that she, too, was a victim of such moods. She was a senior
in high school when she experienced her ﬁrst episode of MDI. She recalled not knowing
what it was, but simply knowing She traveled emotionally from a state of extreme energy
and feeling “high” to one of extreme fatigue and despair and feeling very “low.”

Jamison described the oscillation She experienced between manic and depressive
states as beyond imagination. She described certain times as when “my mind had turned
on me” (p. 38). She vaulted from a state of total exhilaration and high enthusiasm to one
of deep, dark despair in which thoughts of suicide plagued her (p. 38).

After high school, Jamison entered the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA) (p. 41). Her introduction to research, particularly medical research, occurred

during a freshman psychology class. It was during this class that she came to experience

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the lack of clearly deﬁned boundaries between what she called “bizarre and original
thought” (p. 47). Responses she gave to the Rorschach, imaginative responses she called
them, oscillated between bizarre and clever, so much so that her professor ended up
giving her a lab assistant position in his research lab. This turned out to be the beginning
of her academic career and of her journey to authentic selﬂtood.

Environment played a critical role in Jamison’s journey and struggle with MDI.
Journeys she took to England and Scotland to study and do further research always turned
out to be periods of refreshing and times when she was able to put things in perspective.
She took the ﬁrst trip two years after entering UCLA. She applied for and obtained a
grant to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (p. 48). As She recalled, “I
leaned a lot, and had great fun as I did 50” (p. 50). The enthusiasm and renewed energy
She received from this experience permitted her to return to the States, ﬁnish at UCLA,
complete her Ph.D. work, marry, and divorce. In addition to all of this, as she entered the
professorate, She decided she was “ravingly psychotic” (p. 63).

But “ravingly psychotic” was not the half of it. Up to that point, Jamison’s
experience with “ravingly psychotic” had been what she read in textbooks and case
studies. Now She began to experience this state of being personally. The wild,
uncontrollable swings between the extreme highs and the extreme lows were
unimaginable. She described this experience in the following way:

When you 're high it 's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent

like shooting stars, and you follow them until you ﬁnd better and brighter ones.

Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to

captivate others a felt certainty. . . . But, somewhere, this changes. T he fast ideas

are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces
clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends ’ faces are replaced by
fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—
you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the

blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never
end, for madness carves its own reality. (p. 67)

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In 1974, Jamison joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA.
She recalled both meeting her future psychiatrist at the Chancellor’s garden party and
being relatively “normal” for almost a year. And then it returned. Her mind started to run
at an increasingly faster rate. Ideas besieged her from everywhere. She became more and
more ecstatic. She undertook huge spending sprees. She recalled spending upwards of
$30,000 during two of her manic attacks. Then her emotional roller coaster reached the
top of the hill, and she started the descent. Darkness began to enter her mind. She
remembered pulling out her old Rolling Stones albums and sinking further into
depression. She recalled hallucinations taking hold of her. She saw visions and ﬁnally
concluded that she was insane (p. 82). It was at this point in her experience that she
crossed the line between doctor and patient. She became a patient, entered into
psychotherapy sessions, and began taking lithium.

Changes in her condition left her feeling helpless. For Jamison, this disability was
always in the way. She saw it as something she must defeat and overcome. It would take
an encounter in a loving relationship before She would be able to accept her condition and
act accordingly. As she reﬂected on her experience, Jamison used memories in an effort
to reconstruct events and situations and procure some sort of additional insight

(Brookﬁeld, 1987; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991).

Learning Through Love and Acceptance

In this section, Jamison came face to face with her illness. She continued to
recount these horriﬁc episodes of highs and lows. It was during this period that she
entered into a relationship that changed forever both her view of others and that of

herself.

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Her states of euphoria and uncontrolled bliss were states of being she recounted
with some pleasure. She talked at one point of being so ecstatic that she felt as though she
were ﬂying past the rings of Saturn (p. 90). She said of this experience, “I saw and
experienced that which had been only dreams, or ﬁtful fragments of aspiration” (p. 90).
In fact, these episodes of euphoria were so overwhelming that she attributed them to her
initial reluctance to take lithium. The periods of depression that followed these “highs”
were worth enduring for the sake of the highs themselves.

Acceptance of this disease state was not easy for her. Early on, she fought
acceptance quite readily. She was reluctant to take lithium, and when she started to do so,
ﬁnding the right dosage was problematic. The social stigma of admitting she had the
disease was not easy for her to accept. Through all that she experienced, she became
much more understanding of the patients with whom she had to deal. The “subtle, and
not so subtle, resistance to treatment shown by many patients with manic depressive
illness” (p. 105) became real and understandable to her because she experienced it ﬁrst
hand.

The years 1974 through 1981 were important in Jamison’s life because they
marked a key entrance into the academic community and a key acceptance of her
personal situation. During these years, Jamison worked for and attained tenure at UCLA.
Also during these years, she divorced her ﬁrst husband, attempted suicide, acknowledged
She was “psychotic,” struggled with lithium levels, grew very close to her mother who
helped her through her struggles, and started the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic.

The act or process of falling in love started Jamison on her way to making her
beast beautiful. It was David, a visiting professor at UCLA, a psychiatrist on leave from

the Royal Army Medical Corps, who awakened her to this process. He arrived at UCLA

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six months after Jamison’s faculty appointment began, and they hit it off immediately.
She recalled the meeting and the relationship vividly. They found they had many interests
in common. They liked each other immediately, and as a result she found herself

opening up to him quite easily.

Over the course of 18 months, Jamison and David corresponded with each other,
thereby keeping the relationship alive. During this time, her marriage ﬁnally ended, and
she wrote David a letter telling him about it. One day, she returned to her ofﬁce to ﬁnd
David sitting there waiting for her to return. They spent several days together, after which
he returned to England, but not before inviting her to spend several weeks with him. She
accepted his invitation and traveled to England to fulﬁll her dream.

It was during this visit that Jamison began to sense some changes in her medical
condition. As she reﬂected on this time, she sensed that perhaps these changes in her
mental condition were the result not only of drugs, but also of a change in her
environmental situation, including that of a loving, accepting relationship. One day when
She was visiting David in England, Jamison opened her purse and spilled all her lithium
tablets on the ﬂoor of a great cathedral. When she hesitantly opened up to David and told
him of her MDI, his comment to her was, “I say. Rotten luck” (p. 144).

David’s acceptance of Jamison and her disease in some ways changed her
acceptance of herself. His acceptance of her enabled Jamison to accept herself. But David
died. At his funeral, she was reluctant to step forward at his gravesite. However, step
forward she did, and in so doing she said, “He again pushed me forward to watch, to take
it in, to believe it to be so” (p. 150). David proved to be the person who accepted her as
She was and who saw her as a person of intrinsic worth. To him she was a person with

MDI, and not a MDI case who happened to be a person.

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David’s impact on Jamison’s life was profound. Shortly after his death she said,
“The accumulated pain and uncertainty from David’s death, as well as from my own
illness, for several years very much lowered and narrowed my expectations of life”

(p. 153).

In light of this loss, Jamison decided to take a year-long sabbatical in England,
ostensibly to study mood disorders in eminent British artists and writers and also to begin
work on a textbook related to MDI. During her stay, she visited David’s grave in an
attempt to put this relationship behind her and move on. What she learned was that her
relationship with David has affected her far beyond her awareness of it. She offered
signiﬁcant insights into this change by saying, “David had loved and accepted me in an
extraordinary way; his steadiness and kindness had sustained and saved me, but he was
gone. . . . And now, four years after his death, I found a very different kind of love and a
renewed belief in life” (p. 159).

Because of her relationship with David, and because of this time of reﬂection at
his grave some four years after his death, Jamison was able to pull herself together and go
on. With this renewed vigor, she entered into a new relationship with someone she had
met several years earlier on one of her previous journeys to England. Because of the
depth and beauty of this new relationship, She was able to cutback on the amount of
lithium she was taking (p. 161). This very act of reducing her lithium intake changed her
perspective. She said of this, “A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde
Park, along the Side of the Serpentine, when I realized that my steps were literally
bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously

had been ﬁltered through think layers of gauze” (p. 161).

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Learning Self-Acceptance. or This IS Who I Am

In this section we see things come together for Jamison. Through the powerful use
of words and images (Conway, 1998) she brought herself into a new state of being
(Dickerson, 1989). The world that she had made into word now asked to be acted upon
(Freeman, 1993).

The personal acceptance Jamison received helped her redeﬁne herself and accept
herself and her disability. The combined experience of living in England for a year and
being part of a loving and accepting relationship renewed her heart and mind. She
claimed, “Life had become worth not losing” (p. 163). With this new attitude, she moved
into a new modus operandi and began to do research, write, and read autobiographies of
patients struggling with MDI. She also arrived at a new understanding of love. This
became a precursor to her falling in love and marrying a neuropsychiatrist at the National
Institute of Mental Health. She said, “I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are
not substitutes for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life”

(p. 170).

Her newfound experience with and understanding of love and loving relationships
carried over into her professional life. She recounted her experience of talking with a
Danish psychiatrist, Mogens Schou, who told her of his own family’s struggle with MDI
and how this had provided an impetus for him to study the disease. She said of this
encounter,

Talking with Mogens was extremely helpful, in part because he aggressively

encouraged me to use my own experiences in my research, writing, and teaching,

and in part because it was very important to me to be able to talk with a senior
professor who not only had some knowledge of what I had been through, but who

had used his own experiences to make a profound difference in the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people. (pp. 189-190)

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Because of this encounter, she was encouraged to be open and freely discuss her
illness. However, this encouragement did not come without some struggle and hint of
reservation. She talked of how others might perceive her if she was open and honest
regarding her struggle with MDI. But her biggest fear was suffering a loss of meaning
and signiﬁcance if she was too open and honest. She said,

Finally, I am deeply wary that by speaking publicly or writing about such

intensely private aspects of my life, I will return to them one day and ﬁnd them

bleached of meaning and feeling. . . . I am concerned that the experiences will
become remote, inaccessible, and far distant, behind me; I fear that the

experiences will become those of someone else rather than my own. (p. 202)

She proceeded to acknowledge that by doing this she was laying down her “cloak of
academic objectivity” (p. 203). By doing this, she donned the cloak of the participant and
became an experiential learner as well.

It is interesting that what started out as a need on Jamison’s part to “let the cat out
of the bag” regarding her struggle with MDI ended up being an expose' on the subject of
love and its importance to living with the disease. As a matter of fact, she ended her
autobiography with a deﬁnitive statement that she would not change anything. This
disease was a part of who she was, and it was critical to her deﬁnition of herself. She
said,

That darkness is an integral part of who I am, and it takes no effort of imagination

on my part to remember the months of relentless blackness and exhaustion, or the

terrible efforts it took in order to teach, read, write, see patients, and keep

relationships alive. (p. 210)

Her experience with MDI, the wars she had fought and would always ﬁght, were
a real part of who she was. And ironically, she concluded that she would not change
anything.

The vividness that mania infuses into one’s experiences of life creates strong,

keenly recollected states, much as war must, and love and early memories surely
do. Because of this, there is now, for me, a rather bittersweet exchange of a

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comfortable and settled present existence for a troubled but intensely lived past.

(p.211)

What Jamison learned through this self-directed learning process was that the
roles played by love and acceptance were critical. In fact, they were what gave meaning
to the whole experience. They were what enabled her to say, “It’s OK. This is who I am.”

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often

overwhelming forces within our minds. . . . But love is, to me, the ultimately more

extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to Shut out the terror and
awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality.

(pp. 214-215)

Finally, regarding the writing of this autobiography, Jamison said,

When I ﬁrst thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about

moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have

written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love

as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. (p. 215)

The irony in this autobiography was established right there. What Jamison
thought was to be a book about moods, hers in particular, turned out to be something
quite different. Also, what she thought was to be an endeavor with primary emphasis on
description turned out to be an endeavor characterized by evaluation and judgment.
Through the process of writing and creating, she came to see and interpret herself and her
Situation quite differently.

Brady (1990) asserted that “learning is a process by which human beings attempt
to make meaning” (p. 43). Autobiography, in turn, is one channel through which learning
can ﬂow, for through it an individual author is able to recompose and reinterpret his or
her life.

For Jamison, the effort to reconstruct her past and to tell her story was an exercise

in self-directed learning. We see this to be the case as some of the characteristics of the

self-directed learner are independence and autonomy (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991) and

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individual initiative (Knowles, 1975), all of which characterize Jamison and her
endeavor. The very act of writing, of recreating her past, of reliving her past, enabled her
to accept who she was (Nelson, 1994).

Despite all her suffering, would Jamison change anything? Her response was, “I
have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic
depressive illness. . . . Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it” (p. 217).

This phase of her journey was complete. Narrative and reﬂection had come
together to create something new. And learning is apparent because we see its shape
reﬂected in the establishment of meaning and signiﬁcance.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is the story of a woman
who came to grips with the fact that she suffered from a disease that always had been and
always would be with her. In the next section, I review A Whole New Life: An Illness
and a Healing. This is an autobiography in which Reynolds Price wrote about his struggle
with cancer, a disease he contracted in his middle years and ultimately defeated. As such,

it was not a chronic illness, but rather one that left lifelong scars.

Reynolds Price: A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing

Lifelong Learning and the Role of
Exceptional Human Experience

Spear and Mocker (1984), Aslanian and Brickell, (1982), and Mezirow (1990b)
discussed the existence of a disorienting event in an individual life as a possible means
through which learning that transforms or changes a person’s view of the world can
occur. Human disease falls within this category, and proved to be the impetus for changes

that occurred within Reynolds Price.

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Price began his autobiography by stating clearly and succinctly what it was he
planed to do: “This is a book about a mid-life collision with cancer and paralysis” (p. vii).
He went on to say regarding his purpose,

That aim is to give, in the midst of an honest narrative, a true record of the visible

and invisible ways in which one fairly normal creature entered a trial, not of his

choosing, and emerged after a long four years on a new life—a life that’s almost
wholly changed from the old. The record is offered ﬁrst to others in physical or
psychic trials of their own, to their families and other helpers and then to the

curious reader who waits for his or her own devastation. (p. vii)

Because he was uhable to locate a document such as this during his time of trial, Price
decided to create one.

“It was the best of times,” or so it seemed to Price as he entered his 5 lst year. He
had just published a new play based on his 12th book, A Long and Happy Life. He had
been teaching English literature at Duke University for some 26 years. Everything was
going his way. And then he was asked the question that would change his life forever,
“Why are you slapping your left foot on the pavement?” (p. 3).

More and more symptoms begin to manifest themselves. He discovered he could
not run (p. 6). He discovered moments of inexplicable paralysis (p. 6). He discovered
difﬁculty in walking in general (p. 8). All of these symptoms led to a dreaded diagnosis
—a foreign body of some sort crowding the upper portion of his spinal cord (p. 13). The
foreign body turned out to be a malignant tumor (p. 27).

In the meantime, Price began a journey—a journey that would leave him a
changed man, a journey that would last well over four years, a journey that would be
worse than anything he had ever experienced until that time. But it would be a journey
that Price would not want to exchange for anything. It would be a journey that would

become a part of him; it would deﬁne who he was, and it would leave him new and

different.
104

The change in him and to him began to manifest itself during one of Price’s early
stays in the hospital. He acknowledged, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, that life was much
bigger than he was and perhaps had more control of him than he did. In a certain sense,
he found himself gliding on “auto-pilot.” As he awaited the results of medical tests, he
said, “Someway I stayed even-keeled after that. The legacy of physical dread I’d got from
my hypochondriac father had suddenly left me. . . . Inquisitive to a fault though I’d been
all my life, some deep down voice was running me now” (p. l 1).

Price described this as a sort of “unfolding” process. He grew in awareness and
understanding and acceptance. This new understanding or awareness had an emotional
price tag, though. As he came to grips with this “deep down voice” taking over as his
“pilot,” he said, “I was with two people I trusted as much as anyone alive; they’d never
done me the slightest harm. For the ﬁrst time yet, I broke down and wept” (p. 17).

Coupled to Price’s emotional release was a renewed sense of the existence or
presence of God. He did not try to develop or understand doctrinal positions, or seek
answers to the “Why me?” types of questions. He did not ﬁnd himself trying to talk
himself into a state of belief. Rather, his awakening was an awakening to, or an
acceptance of, the existence of God. He found himself attempting to open channels of
communication to, and dialogue with God. This seemed to be a natural state of affairs.
Belief in and the existence of God were natural presuppositions for Price. Several
statements he made early on pointed to these dual ideas of communication channels
opening to God and the need to turn his “ﬂight plan” over to the “control center.” He
said,

I don’t recall indulging in any hard fear or deep soul-searching. Doubtless I

prayed for God’s will to be worked, and I’m sure I added the usual clear

postscript reminding him of my wishes in the matter—he mustn’t act on an
insufﬁcient sense of my needs. (p. 18)

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Pre- and postsurgery, Price related episodes of awareness in which he was
cognizant of the difference between his mind and his body. These did not appear to be
paranormal or out-of-body experiences as such, but they did constitute marked points in
time when he was aware that his body was distinct and separate from himself. Just before
surgery he said, “I was gliding at the end of a very long tether, farther out than I’d ever
been from my body or mind and entirely at case (a bedtime dose of Valium, the ﬁrst of
my life, may still have been active)” (p. 25). And right after surgery, as he began the
recovery process, he recounted the following:

And late in the afternoon each day, I’d be overwhelmed by a rising sense of

dissociation from my whole body. My mind would seem to lead out, rise above

my trunk and limbs and gaze down at them from a helpless neamess. When can I

live again in my body? And where am I now? (p. 31)

As Price began the process of recovery, a clear and distinct act of war, his
awareness of what surrounded him and his understanding of his “self” took some decided
turns. Shortly after his surgery, as he began the recovery process, Price recounted his
reaction to works by such composers as Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel. He said of their
works, “They were pieces I’d known for years, but now I was hearing them as if for the
ﬁrst time” (p. 36). He went on to recount and “wonder” whether perhaps this new
awareness of music contributed to his understanding and acceptance of the fact that the
tumor was real and a part of himself. He did not identify himself with the tumor, but he
did begin to understand that it was a “part” of himself, much like any other organ was a
“part” of himself. This understanding that the tumor was “separate from” yet a “part of”
himself likely marked the beginning of his road to recovery. He described this awareness
in the following manner:

I wonder now, though, if the steady presence of music around me didn’t

contribute importantly to my sense of the cancer as a thing with its own rights.
Now it sounds a little cracked to describe, but then I often felt that the tumor was

106

as much a part of me as my liver or lungs and could call for its needs of space and
food. I only hoped that it wouldn’t need all of me. In any case, along with the few
short poems I was able to write in those early weeks, the music of others—heard
as intently as if I’d made it—was the ﬁrst big weapon in my battery of healing,
my own campaign to outlast the eel. War started in earnest when I went home on
June 22nd. (p. 36)

As Price began his recovery process, he noticed that he was beginning to
experience some strange new sensations. In some respects he saw himself as external to
his own body, watching what was going on. He stated, “The strange new sense of being
suspended outside my body was also growing more frequent and lending my days an
eerie unreality” (p. 38).

Then on July 3, he experienced something, or perhaps more precisely, he
encountered someone in a close and intimate manner. He laid the foundation for the
recounting of this experience by describing his understanding of the existence of a
“merciful power” and the role his parents played in this understanding.

But I grew no ﬁrmer; and on the morning of July 3rd, I had the single strangest
experience of my life till now. I’ve mentioned my tendency to pray, convinced as
I am that my life is intended by a sometimes merciful power that’s at least
connected to, if not identical with, what I believe is the maker of all we know. My
means of thinking about that power and its intentions were formed in my early
childhood by the texts and rites of an unchurchly Christianity which was passed to
me by my parents. (p. 39)

Finally, he came to the experience itself, a personal encounter with Jesus in which
Price was assured he would make it through this ordeal.

So by daylight on July 3rd, morning thoughts of a stiff sobriety were plainly in
order. But in the midst of such circular thinking, an actual happening intervened
with no trace of warning. I was suddenly not propped in my brass bed or even
contained in my familiar house. By the dim new, thoroughly credible light that
rose around me, it was barely dawn; and I was lying fully dressed in modern street
clothes on a slope by a lake I knew at once. It was the big lake of Kinnereth, the
Sea of Galilee, in the north of Israel—green Galilee, the scene of Jesus’ ﬁrst
teaching and healing. (p. 42)

I was in my body but was also watching my body from slightly upward
and behind. I could see the purple dye on my back, the long rectangle that boxed
my thriving tumor.

107

Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over my head
and back till water ran down my puckered scar. Then he spoke once—“Your sins
are forgiven”—and turned to shore again, done with me.
I came on behind him, thinking in standard greedy fashion, It’s not my sins
I 'm worried about. Soto Jesus’ receding back, I had the gall to say “Am I also
cured?”
He turned to face me, no Sign of a smile, and ﬁnally said two words—-
“that too.” Then he climbed from the water, not looking round, really done with
me.
I followed him out and then, with no palpable seam in the texture of time
or place, I was home again in my wide bed.
From the moment my mind was back in my room, no more than seconds
after I’d left it, I’ve believed that the event was an external gift, however brief, of
an alternate time and space in which to live through a crucial act. (pp. 42-44)
From that point forward, no matter what pain or sorrow he might bear, Price knew
he would always be aware of and remember this experience in Kinnereth. In fact, he
claimed this experience conﬁrmed two strongly held convictions (p. 45). One was the
conviction that Jesus bore some mysterious relation to the Creator. The second was the
conviction that the Creator paid closer attention to some creatures than to others.

Jesus’ two words, “that too,” provided assurance to Price that he would survive.
He was not yet aware of all the pain and suffering he must endure. But he knew from that
point forward that he would survive. Additional support for this conviction came from
two friends, Laird Ellis and Jeff Anderson, who told him without any reservation that he
would survive.

We see in this section that the “exceptional human experiences,” the encounters
Price told us he had with God, provided the strength and the stamina for all that he was

about to face. As he continued to reﬂect and compose, a new self was constructed

(Freeman, 1993) and an inner plot discovered (Conway, 1998).

108

Learning Through Reﬂection and Friends

Price was given to periods of melancholy. During one of those periods,
experienced while he looked into the lives of certain artists and writers who had died at
relatively young ages, he noticed that the question “Why me?” never really bothered
those people. In fact, the question “Why not me?” seemed more problematic to him. He
acknowledged that “fairness” was something he never really expected in his life.

As Price reﬂects on this, he concluded that this perspective most likely came to
him from his parents. He claimed that handed down to him was the idea that a normal life
was also sacriﬁcial. In addition, this sacriﬁcial life was to be lived for one of two reasons,
either on behalf of others or perhaps for some unknown reason.

The war Price waged against cancer he called a “patch of fate,” and he
acknowledged that this “patch” felt to him like sacriﬁce (p. 54). In conjunction with
arriving at this understanding or awareness, he acknowledged his use of prayer in yet
another manner, that of substitution. He said,

In prayer I even occasionally tried to offer my trials in substitute for certain others

whom I valued and saw in serious pain of their own, but a victim needs to be

braver than I to take much comfort from that thin gruel—thin and mysterious

(you’ll never know if your pain is credited to another’s account). (p. 54)

Price’s dialogue related to fate and prayer ended with yet another description of
that “mysterious” presence he had encountered earlier in this war with cancer. He
described this as another “means of what felt like prayer.” In his description, he
recounted times of waking in the night and feeling as if there were a “patient listener”
behind a screen in his room. He told of being able to see the faint outline of a head
against the screen. He thought the purpose of this “patient listener” was to help him

discover his own “minimal needs and feasible hopes” (p. 54). He described its role in the

following manner: “Its reliable presence seemed only to say that I had somehow to build

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my life on radical uncertainty, knowing only that I was heard by something more than the
loyal but powerless humans near me” Q). 54).

Personal and professional friends, both known and unknown, played signiﬁcant
roles in Price’s recovery process. He talked of friends and professionals who urged him
to get angry and to bellow his rage (p. 55). Later he talked of an Indian doctor who
helped him use the tool of visualization, a tool that enabled him to picture himself well
and ﬁghting the disease . . . and winning.

Price spoke of his physical therapist, Diana, as providing further encouragement
by relating a dream she had in which she saw Price walking again. He referenced this
incident by saying, “And the fact that a highly trained woman had dared to confess to that
much concern for my ongoing life was a real contribution to my self-respect, a faculty
that every disease aims at and pummels hard” (p. 60).

Letters and communications from friends and colleagues claimed an important
place in Price’s overall healing process. He spoke of the upliﬁ those pieces of
communication brought to him, and just how much all of that meant to him personally.
Most important, through all of this communication, he realized how much his “continued
presence was wanted apparently by more than myself and the household company”

(p. 61 ).

All that Price experienced to that point—the efﬁcacy of communication from
friends and colleagues, the awareness of the presence of God, and the renewed role of
prayer in his life—were, in a sense, preparation for a major act of willpower he needed to
exert very soon. Pain reached a zenith in his life. Steroids created a sort of “bi-polar”
State within him, and he reached the end of his tether. The physician he had leaned on so

hard through this entire ordeal recommended further surgery, and even at that he was not

110

overly optimistic that the surgery would have any lasting beneﬁts. Price was close to
acknowledging that the war was over.

But he did not. He acknowledged that the experience at Kinnereth, even though
bafﬂing, was very real, and it inspired him to take action. At that key point in time and
space, he decided it was time to resist, and the resistance effort was to begin with the
demon of pain (p. 69). This was yet another key point in his healing process, a point
when he decided he would win—an act of sheer willpower.

Imagination played a signiﬁcant role in his life and his road to recovery. He
discovered it was a viable means of expressing what lay deep within his being. One form
of expression Price had given little attention to throughout his life was art—painting and
the creation of images. He acknowledged having delved into this arena as a child, but
Since that time some 45 years earlier he had not done much with it. During his recovery,
however, art took on new meaning for him. It was a means of understanding that rational
thought processes did not afford him (Dirkx, 1997; Kearney, 1988).

Price confessed that his main problem with art was his inability to capture an
“inner light” that he knew existed but that he could not make visible through painting. He
classiﬁed himself as a “slave to surfaces.” As he started playing around with this form of
expression again, he found himself painting pictures of Jesus. Whereas prayer had
become somewhat rote and stagnant to him, these pictures and this painting process
become a new form of prayer. He said of this, “The drawings were a sudden better way,
an outcry and an offering” (p. 74).

Price had what he called a “second uncanny experience” (p. 80). During a period
when he was feeling especially low, he awoke in the middle of the night. After reﬂecting

on his condition for some time, he found himself looking at the ceiling and asking, “How

111

much more do I take?” (p. 80). He was at the end of his tether yet again. But as he relived
this experience, he recalled ever so vividly hearing a voice saying to him, “More.”

The following morning, Price asked his care-giver to call her minister at the
Methodist church and ask him to come and administer the sacrament of communion. As
Price reﬂected on the process of receiving communion, he said, “I experienced again the
almost overwhelming force which has always felt to me like God’s presence” (p. 81).
This was yet a second encounter with the overwhelming presence of God in his life.

Time continued to work away at Price’s soul. He reacted to his circumstances
much like Dorothy did when she landed in the Land of OZ. She slowly looked around
and languidly moved about, taking in her new surroundings and wondering just where
she was. She was ﬁlled with wonder and amazement, rather than with fear. So too, Price
seemed to react more like a person experiencing a new setting and a new life than he did
someone who was angry at the cards life had dealt him.

What we have seen in this section is the importance Price attached to friends and
imagination as he reﬂected on his battle with cancer. The “inner plot” that Conway
(1998) talked about and the “shades of deeper meaning” that Dickerson (1989) mentioned

began to acquire form as Price moved on in his reﬂection process.

LeaminﬁgThat Transforms Life

This section culminates with Price deciding there were deﬁnite lessons to be
learned from his experience. Although he was not familiar with the language of Kolb
(1984) and Dewey (193 8), Price would readily concur that experience without reﬂection
is not learning, and that reﬂection is indeed the "ability for learners to think of their past

experiences in order to learn from them" (Kolb, 1984, p. 6).

112

During the course of an intensive four-week rehabilitation experience, Price came
to the realization that walking, complete motor rehabilitation, would not be regained.
Messages both spoken and unspoken from friends, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists
gradually led him to this conclusion. For a brief moment he wondered whether his
surgeon, Dr. Friedman, ever entertained second thoughts as to whether he should have
performed risky surgery a year earlier, surgery that, had it been successful, would have
resulted in Price’s walking again. But Price did not allow himself to go very far down the
road of wondering, for he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that what he was
experiencing was meant to be. Upon grasping this realization, he said, “What happened in
and to me, happened, I more than half believe, for an interesting reason that—nine years
later—has begun to be visible. I rest now in that” (p. 100).

Brunet (1995) and Knowles (1980) both believed that what happens to us is not as
Si gniﬁcant as how we interpret the happening(s). What meaning and signiﬁcance do we
attribute to the happening(s), and how do we use these results to construct a “new” self?
Price, some nine years removed from his illness, began to see why what he had gone
through was valuable and transforming.

This four-week period turned out to be a turning point in Price’s life. He came to
the realization that walking again was not in his future and that for some inexplicable
reason—beginning to make itself evident some nine years later as he wrote this
autobiography—there was a reason behind all he was experiencing. What seemed to help
him arrive at this conclusion was his growth in awareness that other people around him
were in much worse Shape than he was. He said, “Useful as those skills would prove in

daily life, looking back I can see that by far the most important gain of the four weeks

113

came in the intimate day-and-night contact with other people as hard up as I and often
much worse” (p. 105).

One of the key lessons Price learned through his ordeal was the control and power
he had over his body. As the recovery process proceeded, pain and the ability to manage
it became more and more important. At one point he recounted, “For the ﬁrst time yet, I
couldn’t sit up to Slide out of bed. The pain was that ferocious and frightening. I couldn’t
even Sit up to eat but was fed by Lawrence through a straw” (p. 129).

Terror and panic attacks accompanied Price’s struggle with pain. At certain times
it was only the help of friends that got him through these ordeals. He began to be free
from pain after he was introduced to hypnosis and biofeedback. These processes, which
he was aware of in name only, were introduced to him by a psychiatrist at Duke. After
eight weeks of learning about and going through these processes, Price claimed he was
virtually free from pain. It was a battle of and in the mind, one of unprecedented
proportions. He said,

I can make that claim because I’m convinced that all pain has one huge design on

uS—to rule our minds—and therefore that the secret of living with pain is wanting

hard to throw it out of central control, then ﬁnding the sane means to work that

steady mental combination of distancing and coexistence. (p. 160)

Price set the stage for the ﬁnal chapter of his autobiography, the chapter where it
all came together for him, by recounting his week-long experience in New York City. It
gave him an opportunity to look back and reﬂect over the last four arduous years of his
life. He stated,

With all that newness, still the full week was a last conﬁrmation that after four

subterranean years I’d really come through to the other side of my old life and

was certiﬁed now as a new thing—certiﬁed by a city that shows a minimal mercy
and by the friends I‘d gone without for four long years; a new man who

nonetheless bore enough likeness to their former friend to permit resumption of
dialogue. (p. 172)

114

Price ﬁnishes his autobiography with this poignant question, “Was it a disaster—
all that time from my slapped-down sandal in spring ’84 through the four years till I
reentered life as a new contraption, inside and out?” (p. 178). His response was a
resounding “NO.” He claimed there was no way he would exchange anything. What he
experienced was crucial to his deﬁnition of himself, and a whole new deﬁnition at that.
His following comment is evidence of this:

But if I were called on to value honestly my present life beside my past—the

years from 1933 to ’84 against the year after—I’d have to say that, despite an

enjoyable ﬁfty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still
better. They’ve brought more in and sent more out—more love and care, more

knowledge and patience, more work in less time. (p. 179)

As Price looked back and reﬂected on what his experience meant, he discovered
several truths. One of these related to the importance of people and the whole realm of
relationship. This discovery led him to state, “In that deep trough I needed companions
more than prayers or potions that had worked for another” (p. 180). He discovered that
people with whom he could share his struggle, and who in turn were able to share in his
struggle, were a great need, more so than prayers or any sort of preconceived formula that
seemed to have worked for others. Friends were available, but not companions. Of
friends he said, “But again their care is often a brake on the way you must go . . . (they
were trained like you, in inertia)” (p. 183).

Closely related to this was the awareness Price developed that there was no one to
come alongside him and share his or her own story of a Similar battle. He said, “I needed
to read some story that paralleled, at whatever distance, my unfolding bafﬂement—some
honest report from a similar war, with a ﬁnal list of hard facts learned and offered

unvamished—but again I never found it” (p. 181). But he found no one. This ﬁnding, or

more correctly lack of ﬁnding, was what led to the creation of this narrative.

115

Price learned three important lessons from his experience, three lessons he felt
obliged to share with his readers. These lessons were as follows:

1. You are in your present calamity alone, as far as this life goes. If you want a

way out, then dig it yourself, if there turns out to be any trace of a way.
Nobody, least of all a doctor, can rescue you now, not from the depths of your
own mind, not once they have stitched your gaping wound.

2. Generous people—true practical saints, but some of them boring as root
canals—are waiting to give you everything on Earth but your main want,
which is simply the person you used to be.

3. But you are not that person now. Who will you be tomorrow? And who do
you propose to be from here to the grave, which may be hours or decades
down the road? (p. 182)

What Price secretly longed for, to be the person he used to be, could not be
fulﬁlled. There was no turning back. The road lay ahead and it was a road characterized
by reinventions of his self. It was also a “road less traveled.” He said,

Yet if you don’t discover that next appropriate incarnation of who you must be,
and then become that person at a stiff trot, you’ll be no good whatever again to

the ruins of your old self nor to any friend or mate who’s standing beside you in
hopes of a hint that you’re feeling better this instant and are glad of company.

(p. 183)

The question Price learned to ask was “not ‘Why me?’ but ‘What next?’” (p. 185).
The ability to move forward, to redeﬁne himself and his purpose was a valuable asset. It
was interesting to review his “text,” as it were, and see the emphasis he placed on the
idea of never giving up, avoiding those who encouraged giving up, and the importance of
becoming a “new” self. He captured the essence of his learning experience, not with an
answer, but rather with a question: “Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now?”

(p. 184).

116

Smart

Both Jamison and Price came to the conclusion that their respective diseases were
part and parcel of a learning process that left both of them new and transformed people.
For Jamison it was a disease, manic-depressive illness, that she had to live with and that
would be a part of her until she died. For Price, it was the results of a disease, cancer, that
he had to live with the rest of his life.

What learning takes place from and through the textual creation of an
autobiography? The process of writing, of creating text, permitted both Jamison and Price
to go back and relive moments in their respective pasts. In so doing they were able to
weave, from seemingly isolated incidents and occurrences, a narrative that provided a
sense of coherence and identity to their individual selves (Clark, 2001; Eakin, 1999).

They began by seeing their illnesses as something “other” than themselves;
something that existed “out there”; something that had to be conquered, defeated, and
extirpated from themselves. When they ﬁnished their respective autobiographies, they
saw their disease states as being endemic to who they were. They had embraced their
conditions. In Jamison’s case, she was prepared to live with it. In Price’s case, he was
prepared to live with the results of it. In fact, they would have it no other way.

As She drew her autobiography to a close, Jamison asked herself what She would
change in her past if She could change anything. Her response was nothing. Price, on the
other hand, summarized his experiences in succinct pieces of advice he passed along to
his readers. He said,

1. I’ve made it clear that the ﬁrst strong props beneath my own collapse were

prayer, a single vision that offered me healing, the one word More when I
asked “What now?” and a frail continuing sense of purpose, though my

hungry self often worked to drown any voice that might otherwise have
reached me from the mind of God or plain common sense. (p. 184)

117

2. Never give death a serious hearing till its ripeness forces your ﬁnal attention
and digniﬁed nod. It will of course take you screaming if it must, if you insist.

(p. 186)

3. And keep control of the air around you. Many well-meaning mates, lovers and
friends will stand by, observing that you’re in the throes of blind denial—Give
up. Let go. Get them out of your sight and your hearing with red-hot haste; use
whatever force or fury it takes. Then try to choose life. Then see who you can
live with now. (p. 186)

4. Find any legal way to avoid my ﬁrst mistake, which was sitting still in
cooperation with the cancer’s will to ﬁnish me fast. . ..I wish to God I had——
any legal acts to break the inward gaze at my withering self. (p. 187)

5. Your chance of rescue from any despair lies, if it lies anywhere, in your
eventual decision to abandon the deathwatch by the corpse of your old self
and to search out a new inhabitable body. The old T heologica Germanica
knew that “nothing burns in Hell but the self”—above all, the old self broiling
in the fat of its endless self-pity. (p. 188)

The autobiographical process left Jamison and Price new and changed people.
Through an imaginative process of reﬂection and critical thinking, both authors were left
with a transformation in both their perspectives and their practice (Nelson, 1994). This
imaginative and creative process permitted them to fuse what had happened in the past
with what was happening in the present in order to create an “idealized self-concept”
(Brady, 1990) and move forward.

Both authors were well into their middle years when they “paused” to create their
respective narratives; both exhibited characteristics of the self-directed leamer—
independence, autonomy, and self-motivation; and both had a simple goal, the telling of
a story that needed to be told. It was through the realization of this simple goal that
learning took place, for the result of all of this was the voice of a new being (Conway,
1998)

This chapter dealt with learning that takes place as a result of writing about the

struggle with disease and illness. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate learning that

118

transpired as a result of writing about career transition and the inﬂuence this can have on

an individual life.

119

CHAPTER 4

LEARNING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF CAREER TRANSITION

Introduction

This chapter explores learning that occurred in the lives of two authors as the
result of writing about the experience of career transition. Two other autobiographical
accounts are used in this exploration. The ﬁrst is The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of LJob Lost
and aLife Found by Don Snyder. This is a narrative account of one person’s journey
from a position of privilege, to one of desperation, to one of hope and promise. The
second is A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned by Jane Tompkins. This is a
narrative account Of one person’s journey back to the founding experiences of her life in
an attempt to discover who she is and how these early experiences helped shape her.

I summarize the story underlying each autobiography, drawing special attention to
times and substance of learning. At the end of each autobiographical section, I provide a
summary of the lessons each author learned through his or her unique self-directed

learning process. The ﬁnal section is a brief summary of the chapter.

Don Snyder: The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found
Learning Begins With a Disorienting Dilemma
Yet another form a disorienting dilemma can take is a job loss. Many things can
and do happen to people as they struggle to reforrnulate their individual meaning
schemes. Brady (1990) claimed that one of the tasks of autobiography is to reconstruct
the unity of life across the expanse of time. Part of this reconstructive process—the

telling—is under the control of the author. Another part of this reconstructive process——

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the circumstances—is not under the author’s control. Meaning results from this self-
directed and autonomous learning from experience.

Snyder began his memoir with the following statements, both of which were
instrumental in setting the stage for his self-directed learning pilgrimage:

Their names are still real to me. Percy Sergeant. Wayne Lavasseur. Paul Gaudette.

And now I think of them as survivors of some kind of night journey that I never

believed was out there for me. . . . Maybe this accounts for why the

disillusionment is spreading into the middle class, not because the disillusionment

is rising but because people like me are ﬁnally falling. Falling hard. (p. 8)

As Snyder began his reﬂection process, the process of looking back and trying to
make sense of it all, he realized that after all he had been through, after all that he had
experienced, his story was probably the norm rather than the exception. All of the
running he had done was away from himself. He was caught in the trap of being or trying
to be where, when all was said and done, the process of becoming was what was most
real.

Born, raised, and educated in Maine, Snyder prepared himself from the beginning
to live a life with society’s elite. The position at Colgate was a dream come true. All the
years of studying and preparation had ﬁnally paid off. He was one of the nation’s elite, a
professor at one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher education.

Snyder was one of the baby-boomer generation’s elite. He attended a private
college on a football scholarship. From there he headed into graduate school riding high
on a “big fat” fellowship. He met Colleen while in Europe and they married there. He
talked of overseas job Offers early in his career. His geographical mobility was further

emphasized when Snyder reminisced that, before his ﬁrst child started ﬁrst grade, he and

Colleen had moved across 17 states, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Irish Sea. In a sense, he

121

entered the academy having been there and done that. Then he began to ask, “Now
what?”

Snyder’s reaction to this life situation of being “let go” was one of disbelief and
incredulity. “T hey got the wrong guy ” (p. 15). His train could not be derailed like that.
Something was wrong. Through the process of reﬂection and writing about this event,
and the situational change that resulted, Snyder invited readers to participate in his
struggle with personal identity and his journey to authentic selﬁiood.

When Snyder arrived at Colgate, his ﬁrst task was to make the dean see “who I
am” (p. 15). Before it was all over, Snyder arrived at a new understanding of just who he
was. He would cease being merely an independent observer of this thing called living,
and would become an active participant in life.

When the dean announced that his contract was not going to be renewed, Snyder
was astounded. However, he soon discovered that it was not nearly as difﬁcult to accept
that news as it would be to tell his wife that he had been terminated. He ﬁnally broke the
news to her:

At ﬁrst she didn’t say anything. Then she skated back and told me how her father

had been laid off once when she was a little girl; he was so ashamed he pretended

to go to work each day, and for a couple of months be fooled the family.

“Your father’s like all the men I grew up around,” I told her. “To them, all the

great enterprises of life—political elections, religion, even love itself—had no

meaning unless they were holding down a job.” (p. 20)

What Snyder captured here was the essence of how being a male is deﬁned in
today’s society. Sheehy (1999) noted the universality of this experience:

At the same time, a new model—postpatriarchal man—is in the process of

formation. Mostly he is forming among well-educated, well-married men under

40. . . . Being a good provider is still the primary way men deﬁne themselves.

What has changed so drastically is that fewer men, and more and more women,
can fulﬁll that role. (p. 18)

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One of the primary struggles Snyder faced was that related to vocation.
Throughout his pilgrimage there was a sense of “calling,” a sense of vocation that played
itself out in his struggle. No one wants just a job.

We had a good last year at the university. Like anyone who has ever taught young
people at any level I had experienced from time to time an extraordinary feeling
of gratitude when, working with a student, something would click and suddenly I
felt certain that fate was at work. Fate had sorted through our random ﬂights
across the planet so that our paths would cross at the precise moment in time
when the student’s life required just a nudge in order to turn toward fulﬁllment.
It’s a custodial thing—the housekeeper, while draping her coat over the back of a
kitchen chair, causally turns the potted plant toward the light; it’s just a half turn
and she does it without a thought in her head, but it then enables the plant to
ﬂourish. This is the reason, I believe, that certain professions are still referred to
as callings, and this calling, which for me had always been just a faint rustling in
the grass, began, in my last months at Colgate, to turn to a steady breeze. (p. 25)

What the reader begins to see early on in Snyder’s autobiography is his struggle,
unbeknownst to him until now, to make his life important. And the struggle is not unique
to him. In fact, it is similar to the one faced by Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. The
struggle to be liked and the struggle to make a life important are similar.

But now I wondered if I had done it in order to prove something about myself. To

prove perhaps that I deserved a celebrated life and the kind of comfortable

university position such a public accomplishment would win me. I cared, of
course I cared about the soldier and his family. I cared deeply. But it came to me
as I drove up the interstate that I had always been someone who picked his battles
carefully, always calculating what they would be worth to me in the long run.

In spite of all my introspection, I didn’t see anything the way it actually was,

though I did have the profound suspicion that the world might have changed.

(pp. 42-43)

Transformative learning theory tends to focus on the critical-reﬂection component
of the learning process. Taylor (1997) pointed out that although critical reﬂection is
important, it does not account for all that takes place during the learning process.

Interpersonal relationships also are important, and these may help to understand learning

that takes place on an affective level. In Snyder’s case, the businessman he encountered

123

during the course of his journey played a signiﬁcant relational role in his grth in
understanding.

During the course of his journey, Snyder encountered a businessman at the Little
League ﬁeld near his home and began a relationship with him. He said of their ﬁrst
meeting, “It came on slowly between the two of us, the way it often does between men”
(p. 64). This businessman shared a similar experience to that of Snyder. A castaway from
a development company that had gone out of business, he had been unemployed for
upwards of two years. His function in Snyder’s life seemed to be that of a wise sage who
periodically threw some words of wisdom at him. His wisdom derived from the fact that
he, too, had experienced the same situation—no job, a break in the career path. He told
Snyden

I’ve been there too. You’ve got to remember it’s not your fault; you didn’t screw

the dean’s wife, did you? No. It’s the whole friggin’ country now. A man can’t

get a break anymore. Not a white man, at least. Remember this—whenever you
feel like blaming yourself, take a look around, it’s not you, it’s the damned
system. Communism went bust, and we’re all so busy gloating about that, we
can’t see that we’re next. The civilization is in decline, my friend. These are bad

times and it’s not your fault. (p. 65)

The encounter with this businessman solidiﬁed in Snyder’s mind his self-identity,
or at least what he thought his self-identity to be. But he was going to discover a self that,
at this point in his journey, he could not imagine existed. It would take years of new
experiences, mental and spiritual anguish, and ﬁnally a self-directed and self-disciplined
activity of writing about these experiences before he saw a new “me” emerge. “That ’s
who I am, I thought. 1 'm someone who 's always pulled through. That 's who I always was.
And that '5 who Istill am” (p. 68).

Snyder reﬂected further on how he deﬁned or saw himself in his early years:

Suddenly I remembered all of it. How badly I had wanted to please the guests and
my employers at the hotel and how, because it was the summer of 1970, this had

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placed me at odds with most of the other workers. . . . Then, whaml The doors

sprung off their hinges. We don’t really deﬁne ourselves by our liberties, but by

our limitations, and when you’re young you know who you are by the boundaries

placed around you. That summer when the boundaries suddenly vanished I was

just plain bewildered. (pp. 71-72)

Snyder returned to the Little League ﬁeld and his businessman “guide.” He said
of the meeting, “He told me that I was a romantic and that I needed to come up with a
Single thing that I wanted to accomplish” (p. 79). He continued, “It was brilliant. In his
simplicity he had tapped into the central belief that so many of us hold on to stubbornly.
The belief that comprises the trusting embrace of Western civilization. The belief that the
possession of a thing will bring happiness” (p. 81).

The businessman was just the beginning of Snyder’s venture into the importance
of relationship in his overall learning process. As we will see in the next section, his
discovery that interpersonal relationships were signiﬁcant led him to view and appreciate

literature in a new and different manner. Both discoveries proved to be instrumental to

his learning process.

Learning Through Literature
During a house hunting expedition with a realtor in Maine, Snyder had another
epiphany. He recounted,

In this one afternoon I saw it all—the life I had run from, and the life I was
running toward. The low bass note of poverty, and the screeching high of
prosperity. All that was required of a man in order to ﬁnd his place at some
sensible point between these two extremes was judgment, the moderating
inﬂuence of reason. I wondered if this was something I did not possess, if I had
given it up in my effort to be liked and to get ahead or lost it somewhere along the
way in my rush forward. (p. 85)

Soon after this revelation, Colleen provided another insight when she let him
know that the “me” he thought existed and the “me” he was showing to others were not

one and the same.

125

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“You sound so awful,” she said.
“I was just trying to make everyone laugh,” I said, turning off the radio. “I’m

sorry.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “It scared me. You can’t see yourself, but we can, and

we’re all scared.” (p. 86)

During one of their meetings, the businessman told Snyder, “In the new age, those
entitled to the prizes were those who learned how to break the rules and get away with it”
(p. 101). This marked Snyder’s entrance into a life totally at odds with himself, a life of

.‘J
cheating and deception. He evidenced this “new life” when he applied for a life insurance
policy and used a sample of his son Jack’s urine for the urine test. In addition, he applied
for a teaching position at Princeton and faked telephone calls to follow up on the progress
of his application. He ﬁnally concluded, “Is a guy entitled to a job at Princeton who does
Shit like faking phone calls and cheating insurance companies?” (p. 101).

During the course of his transition, Snyder faced the dilemma of what to do about
an old car that needed more repair work than it was worth. Remembering a former
student whose father owned a Ford dealership in Ohio, Snyder traveled to Ohio to visit
her, in hopes that she would be able to provide him with a car. During that visit he was
challenged to think about reality and to recognize his inability to accept what was real,
just like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of @lesman.

The awakening began when she said she thought of him as Biff.

She knew, and her expression changed to one of pure sympathy. “ But I
think of you as Biff,” she told me as she held out a fresh glass of scotch.

Oh Christ, I thought.

“ The golden boy who gets lost?” She said.

“Why does he get lost?” I asked her.

“Because he believed all the Silly sentimental ideas that Willy held out

there for him.” (pp. 112-113)

Snyder further recounted his gradual awakening to the internal reenactment of

Death of a Salesmaa and to the role his former student had played in that disclosure.

126

She laughed. “Yes. And Charley says—I know it verbatim—Charley says, ‘When
are you gonna realize that those things don’t mean anything? You named him, but
you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And
the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.”’

I interrupted and said, rather weakly, that things like friendship and loyalty
should be more than just sentimental.

“Sure,” she said, dismissing me. “And Willy desperately wanted to be
liked. Remember? He thought that if he was liked, he would end up ﬁne. He
wouldn’t go broke or lose the respect of his sons.” . . .

She smiled again, and said she knew that I was too proud to accept charity.
“Just like Willy,” she said. (pp. 113, 115)

Willy’s desire to be liked and Snyder’s desire to be respected were closely related.
Both thought everything would be all right, were their respective dreams to be fulﬁlled.
Neither thought he would endure ﬁnancial hardship if his dreams were fulﬁlled, Willy to
be liked and Snyder to be respected. Snyder’s former student zeroed in on this in the
following exchange:

“Willy starts to tell Charley that he always thought that if a man was impressive
and well liked, that nothing bad would happen to him. And Charley says—I know
this whole part too; you remember, you put it on our ﬁnal exam? He says to
Willy, ‘Why must everybody like you? Who liked J .P. Morgan? Was he
impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he
was very well liked.’

“I love that line, with his pockets on.” (pp. 114-115)

This theme of facing reality, of redeﬁning himself, of honestly addressing the
“Who am I?” question was further developed when, on his way home from visiting this
former student and her father’s Ford dealership, Snyder stopped to visit Bradford, an old
high school friend. While they were reminiscing in the front seat of a car, Bradford
confronted him with a question suitable for Willy Loman:

“How about talking about you, then,” he said softly after a few minutes of silence.
“About you not facing reality.”

“That’s not what this is about,” I told him.

“It’s not? It seems to me that’s exactly what this is about. You may have
to work two or three Shitty jobs next year to pay your bills. Hell, you may have to
live in a mobile home—plenty of decent people do. You’ve been expecting great
big things to happen to you for as long as I can remember. For Colleen’s sake, and
for the kids’, you’re going to have to grow up.” (p. 117)

127

Snyder had a major revelation soon after his encounters with his former student
and with Bradford. He said of this revelation,

I don’t offer this as an excuse, but I think that the reason I ran around like a man

chasing his hat in a gale for the rest of that summer is because I was still under the

inﬂuence of the great false belief of my generation that life is more about fate

than accommodation [italics added]. (p. 118)

The false belief that “life is more about fate than accommodation” indicated that
Snyder was well on his way. The “valley of despair” was getting closer. But further
breaking up of his self-image still needed to occur. Colleen told him that she was
pregnant again, with child number ﬁve. That news, coupled with his angst over the
inability to provide for, lead, and direct his family, forced Snyder to do what he had never
dreamed he would do: lie. And lie he did, not only to his wife but also to himself. He
found himself considering one of the vilest acts of mankind, selling another human being,
and his own child at that. He went so far as to ﬁnd a couple who would be willing and
suitable for the acquisition. Colleen’s announcement that she had miscarried was what
prevented the transaction from actually taking place.

One of the deﬁning moments in Snyder’s autobiography was the encounter he had
with Billy, one of his former students at Colgate. Billy’s father called Snyder and asked
him to talk with Billy, who was severely depressed and had been in and out Of treatment
facilities. Snyder heard Billy’s story and received some strong personal insight when they
began talking about heroes. Billy told Snyder that he had always admired Steinbeck’s
Tom Joad, and that Tom was his hero. Snyder told Billy there are no Tom loads in life.
Billy replied, “That’s what my mom told me. She wanted to let me off the hook just like
you do. Know there are heroes out there who don’t cave in” (p. 142).

Snyder thought, “How could I deny this? I’d wanted to be one myself and even

believed for a long time that I was one” Q). 142). This failure in his own eyes was

128

instrumental in carrying him further down the path of despair. As Snyder started to hunt
through his books to ﬁnd something that would help Billy, he realized, “It was clear to
me in those moments that I had never read any of this literature purely for the sake of
learning; I had always been looking for something in these texts that would make me
appear clever in class or before my colleagues” (p. 143). At that point, he grabbed a
garbage bag and threw away his books and numerous spiral notebooks containing his
lecture notes, which he referred to as being from “an old life.” The break was now
complete; Snyder was stripped of every vestige from the past.

Snyder did not and could not process these revelations over night. He was being
faced with something totally new. For 11 months, he was conﬁned to his bedroom. The
only relief he found was in a weekly venture to the grocery store. This was the point in
his journey at which he hit rock bottom.

Snyder could do little more than shop once a week during this ll-month episode.
He says of his shopping trips,

Here was the gallery in which America’s ﬁnest exhibitions of marketing and

productivity were on display, and I wandered up and down the mirrored aisles like

an immigrant who couldn’t understand a word of the written language. . . . I chose
products for their packaging, hopeful that the bright colors would pierce the
darkness of my home and light out way back to a meaningful existence. At the
checkout lanes it sometimes took all my powers of self-possession to keep from

trembling before the cashier and just walking away from my loaded cart. (p. 167)

Other authors who have experienced depression have described it differently.
Jamison (1995) succinctly depicted the state of depression in the following way:

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images; I would not go through

an extended one again. It bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of

conﬁdence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think
normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good
to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old,

to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish,
and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the

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pleasure of sex, the exquisiteness of music, or the ability to make yourself and
others laugh. (p. 217)

As Snyder reﬂected on his experience from the vantage point of his present
situation, he began to identify an “inner plot” (Conway, 1998). Conversations with other
people, and conversations from literature, acted as a sort of mirror for his process of
learning and self-discovery. The autobiographical process (Brunet, 1995) was beginning
to unveil “shades of deeper meaning” (Dickerson, 1989). Now that he had reached the

bottom, there was nowhere to go but up.

The Joumg Home. or Putting It All Together

Not long after hitting rock bottom, Snyder began to see things differently. Reality
took on a new form and developed new meaning. One morning as he sat reading the
Boston Globe and taking in the economic news, he realized that something was being
taken from them. He said, “It was just a moment, but I suddenly felt certain that
something was being taken from us—something that was a lot bigger than a job or
money” (pp. 179—180).

Snyder’s relationship with his son Jack took on new meaning and signiﬁcance as
they hid in the trees and went on “golf ball” expeditions. He learned to laugh again and to
enjoy the beauty of a relationship, a relationship for its own sake and not for what he
might get out of it. He recounted this new understanding as follows: “For a few days he
stayed at home with his mother, and I went to the golf course alone, where I discovered
that his company meant more to me than the economics I’d imposed upon our
adventures” (p. 183).

For a while, work took on new meaning for Snyder. He fell into a sort of

“rhythm” with work, and this carried him along for a short time. But then the monotony

130

returned; before long, unresolved anger set in and he quit his golf-course job. As Snyder
was wallowing in a certain amount of self-pity and despair, Colleen donned her
Superwoman costume and rushed in “to save the day.” She confronted him emotionally,
and spiritually shook him by asking, “What about you? What do you want to do? You
can do whatever you want to do” (p. 199). She went on to say, “I think you look down on
people who just do regular jobs so they can pay their way. I don’t. I’ve never thought one
person was better than another person because of the job he does, but I think you do. I
think you always have” (p. 200).

It all came together for Snyder when he landed a job helping to build a $1.5
million mansion on the shores of Maine. He had experienced the depths of human
degradation, the state of being depressed. This is the point in a person’s life when one hits
the “Cntrl, Alt, Delete” buttons on his or her personal “Spiritual” computer and
essentially “resets” the entire system. When someone comes out of this state of being
depressed, it is tantamount to starting over. Life is seen and experienced through a
different set of lenses. People look different. Objectives change. What is important takes
on new meaning. This is what happened to Snyder after his struggle with depression. It
occurred the year he landed the mansion-construction job.

Snyder recalled the following scene upon returning home after his ﬁrst day at
work. In a sense, he captured the essence of what it means to be alive.

As soon as we got home I went into the kitchen and took the food stamps from the

cupboard, where we kept them in a glass jar. That night I threw them into the ﬁre

while Erin was watching. . . . I could almost see her recounting this scene for her
investment banker husband ﬁfteen years down the road who chuckles along with
her and says, “Baby, no wonder you guys were always so poor. Your old man was

a hopeless romantic.” It was for him, the future husband , that I continued on

awhile longer, trying to impress upon my daughter that the notion of a lucky

person helping an unlucky person was the only thing that held civilization
together. (p. 206)

131

Snyder encountered frustration in ﬁnding the narrative in his work. What was the
story, and how did it ﬁt with his overall account?
I always looked at Billy and ﬁgured he wasn’t speaking to me because he was
building a house and he hadn’t ﬁgured out yet what the hell I was doing. It was
like standing outside reading a book in a freezing cold wind, on a busy street with
trafﬁc roaring by, reading page after page and trying to grab hold of the meaning
of the pages amid the noise and the cold, but the paragraphs just turn into more
paragraphs and no story ever begins. I kept looking for the narrative in my work,
something that was moving forward and that would add up to a house. (p. 216)
As he reﬂected on his life and priorities up to that time, Snyder thought about how
Mike, the bricklayer, would have seen things:
I was distracted, way out there, thinking mostly about how I had always tried to
please peOple who I believed to be above me. I was thinking how someone like
Mike, a bricklayer, wouldn’t have tried to appease the feminists in the English
Department at Colgate or anyone else. He wouldn’t have spent his energy trying
to insinuate himself into another life that looked better, easier. I began thinking
again about Death of a Salesman. (p. 221)
The worst that could ever happen to someone was never to ﬁnd out who she was.

Snyder reﬂected on Biff’s comments about Willy Loman at the end of Death of a

Salesman:

Biff: He never knew who he was.
Biﬁ? Charley, the man didn 't know who he was. (p. 222)

Suddenly, it all came together for him. He began to realize that his life was not that
much different from Willy Loman’s. “It was plain to me at last. Like so many in my
generation I had been a salesman my whole life, selling myself to whoever I thought
might make me more of a success. Now, like Willy, I had a couple of spots on my hat”
(p. 222).

Through all of this, Snyder realized he had been a salesman all his life, always
trying to close the sale on himself, always trying to sell himself to the next level in his

hierarchy. But he had begun to change and to see things differently. He realized that

132

those with whom he was working, and Mike in particular, were content with who they
were.

The next day it snowed again. . . . I watched Mike walking to his truck at the end

of the day. He knew who he was, and like all people who know who they are, a

kind of grace attended him and his work. The snow that afternoon cast a silence

upon the house, and I felt changed. (p. 223)

Snyder’s anger with life and with the “system” was brought to a head through an
encounter with Rob at the construction site of the multi-million-dollar house. While
laying sewer pipe for the new house, it occurred to Snyder that his was the one job that
could sabotage the whole project. What could be worse than living in an expensive house
with a sewer system that did not work? Rob came to the rescue and put everything in
perspective for Snyder.

“A year ago I think I might have turned it backwards,” I said to my friend. “I

don’t know why, but for a long time after I was ﬁred, I just wanted to take

something.”

He listened patiently, a good-hearted, hardworking man who had already
paid off the mortgage on his house and set aside enough money for his three kids’
college education. Then he wrote me a beautiful letter that ended this way: “In
doing your work this winter, you will have extracted your own pound of ﬂesh
from the rich man who will in legal title own it. But in a true sense, the ediﬁce
will always be more yours than his.” (pp. 230-231)

Snyder began to emerge from this whole transitional period when he realized he
was tired of talking about himself. He said of this epiphany, “I wanted to tell her all these
things, but I was suddenly so tired of talking about myself that I just kept silent as we
walked along the beach” (p. 243). What a state of being! He had ﬁnally arrived. The
process of reﬂection and self-analysis had come to an end. Finally, he was “tired of
talking about” himself.

Snyder settled down with his new sense of identity. He recalled this moment in

the following manner:

133

Later, when I thought about that moment and why I had felt so satisﬁed, I realized
that it was because of what else I could say now—I’m just a man who paints
houses for a living, and who pays his own way through this world, and who takes
care of his family and fears for his children’s future and doesn’t try to become
something else and doesn’t judge others, and who lays down his tax money
willingly because he can afford to help people who can’t ﬁnd their own way.

(p. 250)

His work took the Shape of a vocation when he said , “I felt all of that, the
meaning of it had settled deep inside me” (p. 251). There was a sense of contentment, a
spiritual, emotional, and mental coming to terms with both his place in life and life in his
place. He summed it all up when he said to his son Jack, “It’s the work, Jack. You do the
work the right way even if you’re working for a jerk” (p. 264).

Sheehy (1999) summed up the type of multi-year experience, or passage, Snyder
experienced in the following manner:

If there is anything certain about a passage, it is uncertainty. In ordinary

circumstances, without the blow of a life accident, the doubts about your

outgrown identity, shifting values, and the meaning crisis—all issues linked to the
midlife passage—are revealed over a period of years. You have time to adjust.

But when they are thrust on you all at once, . . . you cannot immediately accept

them. The downside of life comes too hard and fast to incorporate. (p. 41)

But incorporate it he did. And through a process of self-directed and autonomous
learning, through the instrument of autobiographical writing, he became a new and
different person. The change, or transformation, in Snyder’s view of the world was not an
external phenomenon, something that had transpired outside of and apart from himself.
Rather, it was an internal discovery, an awareness that what is truly important is not
material or quantitative in nature, but rather something that is built on the value inherent
in human relationships. It is difﬁcult to explain and impossible to prescribe. At best, it

can only be described. But it is real nonetheless. And the process of reﬂecting and writing

about experience is what makes this new state of being real.

134

This “autobiographical process” (Brunet, 1995), the act of autobiographical
writing (Brady, 1990; Nelson, 1994), resulted in change and transformation for Snyder as
he critically reﬂected on what he believed to be signiﬁcant events and encounters in his
life. The result of chronicling his journey from a place of privilege to the valley of
despair was both a greater understanding of who he was and a new sense of hope.

The major learning that took place for Snyder was his grth in understanding
that life is more about accommodation than it is about fate. As he reﬂected and wrote,
there was evidence of “internal changes” (Brookﬁeld, 1986) and “autobiographical
learning” (Nelson, 1994) throughout his journey. Essentially, he began to “rewrite”
(Freeman, 1993) himself when, through a series of personal encounters with others, he
arrived at this conclusion:

I don’t offer this as an excuse, but I think that the reason I ran around like a man

chasing his hat in a gale for the rest of that summer is because I was still under the

inﬂuence of the great false belief of my generation that life is more about fate

than accommodation [italics added]. (p. 118)

In this journey from pretense to reality, Snyder discovered that life was much
more about accommodation than it was about fate. Fate for Snyder canied with it a sense
of living in a situation that was ultimately under his control. As he wrote his
autobiography, he came to understand that much of what he had accomplished in his life
before his experience at Colgate was the result of a sort of “running away from” who he
was. It was fate that became his “magic carpet” and allowed him to travel over and
around all the buildings of life. Fate gave him a prep school education, preparing him for
a generous football scholarship and a romantic small-college experience. Fate granted
him fellowships to pursue graduate education. Fate brought him into contact with Colleen

while he was studying and traveling in Europe. Fate permitted him to publish books and

articles. Fate ﬁnally opened doors for him at Colgate. But then fate turned on him, and

135

the doors at Colgate abruptly closed. And fate was no more to be found. Life became a
matter of accommodation, an accommodation to the situations he encountered, situations
that were totally out of his control. Through his experience inward and downward, he
came to the much greater understanding that, for most people, life is much more about
accommodation than it is about fate. It is more about accommodating to what is out of
our control than it is to planning and controlling what our individual situations might be.
And as a result of this self-directed, autonomous learning activity, Snyder emerges a new
and redeﬁned person (Brunet, 1987, 1995, 1999; Conway, 1998; Dickerson, 1989; Eakin,

1999; Gomick, 2001a; McAdams, 1993, 1996).

Jane Tompkins: A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned

The Role of Experience in Learning

A Life in School is the story of a woman who, after many years of teaching,
stopped dead in her tracks and realized that her life in general and her teaching life in
particular were not on the right track. But even more than that, A Life in School is the
story of one person’s growth in personal integrity. It is the story of a personal struggle
with fear, the fear of being found out, the fear of being caught in the act Of acting. It is
also the story of one person’s journey to self-authenticity, effected by and large through
the will, the will to be.

The process of writing her autobiography permitted Tompkins to ﬁgure herself
anew through the process of interpretation (Freeman, 1993). Through a process of critical
reﬂection, aided by her imaginative faculties, She was able to interpret what had taken
place earlier in her life and to use her discoveries to effect change in her life. In
undertaking this project, Tompkins showed that autobiography is both a relationship

among self, others, and language (Conway, 1998) and a process of reconstructing the

136

integrity of life across the expanse of time (Brady, 1990). Finally, this process was self-
directed and resulted in signiﬁcant transformation in her life.

Tompkins was 49 years old and teaching at Duke University when She realized
that things were not right. She described her experience in the following manner:

This realization followed upon a period of internal change, still going on, in

which I gradually became aware that life was not as I had always taken it to be

but something very different. . . . It became clear to me that I was not in my life to
make a career for myself but to give something, though what, speciﬁcally, I didn’t

yet know. (p. xi)

She concluded that what was missing in her life was lacking in the entire
educational process itself; that was a lack of attention to the inner life of the individual.
Why is this so important? Because, as she had come to believe, attention to the inner life
is the beginning of self-understanding, and self-understanding is foundational to a
satisfying life.

Integral to this understanding was Tompkins’s realization that “The experiences
that have meant the most to me have taken forms that are antithetical to what we mean
when we refer to learning in an academic sense” (p. xi). Turning to and learning from her
own experience was at the heart of her enlightenment and, oddly enough, education had
nothing to prepare her to undertake this endeavor.

This discovery or realization proved to be the beginning of a journey, one in and
toward personal transformation. Tompkins quickly discovered that this journey was
unlike anything she had ever experienced. She was mapping heretofore uncharted terrain.
Change and transformation began to occur as She experimented with her teaching style
and methods. The process culminated but did not end when she created this story.

Tompkins began her autobiography by recalling a dream she had early in her

teaching career. It was a dream common to many new teachers. In this dream She saw

137

herself in class when suddenly the whole class walked out on her. She concluded from
this dream that one of her underlying fears was failure. Even more important was her
discovery that all of her education up to that point had done nothing to prepare her for
this fear or to Show her how to handle it. She was on her own.

As Tompkins reﬂected on this event and time, she decided that fuel for this fear
was the tension that existed between authority and the need to be liked and accepted. As a
result, She developed over the ensuing years what she called the “good-cop/bad-cop”
strategy (p. 3). Divestiture of authority equated with the good cop, whereas enforcement
of authority equated with the bad cop.

The themes of obedience and authority were key for Tompkins. Throughout her
autobiography, She struggled with these issues. As a student, from kindergarten through
her Ph.D. degree from Yale, she adhered to the “unwritten” plan of education that says,
“This is what you must do and how you must do it in order to pass this portion of your
educational process.” Following close behind was the issue of authority. Obedience
pertains to the student. Authority pertains to the teacher. Early in her discovery process,
Tompkins learned that “obedience is the basis for everything else that happens in school;
unless the children obey, nothing can be taught. That is what I learned. Obedience ﬁrst.
Or rather, fear ﬁrst, fear of authority, yielding obedience, then, everything else” (p. 4).
All of this Shed light on her self-understanding; She said,

Eventually, I became aware that childhood experiences of authority had

controlled, without my knowing it, the way I exercised and failed to exercise

authority as an adult, and that it was the reality of what had happened at PS. 98,

more than my present one, that had been dictating the terms of my university life,

day to day. (p. 7)

As Tompkins began to reﬂect on her days at PS. 98, one of the schools she had

attended as a child, she struggled with an “inner voice” that said to her, “You don 't have a

138

story to tell” (p. 8). She would not let this voice win, however. Rather than succumbing,
she acknowledged to herself that the voice was really her own and that she must subdue
it. Regarding this voice she said, “I have had to struggle to get by this censorious person,
who would shut me up if she could” (p. 8) . . . and so her story began.

This ﬁrst section highlighted an important discovery that Tompkins made early in
her autobiography. This discovery was the importance that authority had played in her
life since her days at PS. 98. Brunet (1995) said that it is not so much what happens to us
as it is the way we interpret it that makes it so Signiﬁcant. As Tompkins reﬂected on her
days at PS. 98, she recognized that her interpretation of what happened then was greatly

affecting her daily life right now.

Love and Acceptance Are Missing

Tompkins portrayed her inner self as a place of great conﬂict and struggle. Fear
and a lack of self-esteem seem to have plagued her all her life. As she reflected on her
early life, she remembered being afraid of school. She recounted waking up in the
morning, gripped by fear as she contemplated another day of school. Tompkins
concluded from this that something was amiss in relation to her inner self. She said,
“Something’s the matter with me on the inside; it’s as if I smelled bad” (p. 9). To add
insult to injury, she blamed herself for everything she felt. Because her life was not
characterized by neglect, abuse, or mistreatment, She decided, “The way it is, all the
unhappiness seems to be my responsibility, my fault” (p. l 1).

Fear of being late for school plagued Tompkins to such an extent that She would
leave her house early enough to arrive at school before anyone else. She said of this, “On

days when I walked to school I left early so I would never, ever be picked on for not

139

being there on time, never be caught not knowing what I was supposed to do because I’d
arrived too late to hear the command” (pp. 12-13).

This self-imposed fear gripped her and would not let her go. As she reﬂected and
wrote, she began to see a possible link or connection between her experiences as an adult
and the groundwork laid for her as a child. In fact, one of the ﬁrst connections she made
was between fear and shame. She was fearful of school because she was afraid of being
ashamed. She said, “To me, this was what school was really about—avoiding shame”
(p. 22).

So what was it that fed these feelings of guilt and fear? To answer this question,
Tompkins decided she must confront feelings and experiences of her early childhood. As
she continued to reﬂect, she remembered experiences that brought to mind the feelings
associated with loneliness. She recalled returning home from school in the afternoon and
standing in the foyer waiting for her mother to awaken from her afternoon nap. She
struggled with the strong desire to cry, but she fought back and refused to surrender
(p. 34). She felt lonely and empty.

As she recalled this scene, she said , “I’ve been able to understand what happens
to me when waiting for someone who arrives late at a restaurant or an airport” (p. 35).
Because of these early childhood experiences, Tompkins began to understand that she
ﬁlled her life with activity in order to avoid “dead time.”

The target to which all of this was pointing—Tompkins’s fear of school, her fear
of feeling ashamed, her feelings of loneliness and emptiness—was the target of feeling
unloved. Whatever enjoyment life brought was for someone else. She said, “The

emptiness and loneliness became for me a touchstone; they betokened (I thought) a truth

140

about myself: that I was not loveable, that I was both too much and wanting in some
mysterious unnamed thing” (p. 36).

This combination of fear, loneliness, emptiness, and lack of love drove Tompkins’
need to feel accepted. She met this need in a number of ways, the primary one being
walking behind her teachers and picking up their rooms and keeping things neat and tidy
for them. This, for her, was tantamount to being loved and accepted.

As she continued to reﬂect on her childhood, she realized several other things. As
a child, and certainly on into her adult years, she loved to read. For Tompkins, reading
was a way to escape. As she said, “Books were a home away from home, and away from
school. A safe refuge” (p. 43).

Finally, her yearning to be loved and accepted fueled her desire to be Catholic.
The Hayeses were a big Catholic family who befriend her. She sensed they were
connected to something much larger than themselves, and she wanted to be a part of it.
Regarding Catholicism she stated, “I liked the atmosphere; it gave me a feeling of
comfort, a feeling that somewhere things were all right” (p. 48). This drive and desire to
be a part of something larger made her recognize a primary need in her life. She said of
this realization, “I was desperate to be something” 0). 49). At that point in her life, she
was not sure what the “something” was, but it turned out to be a major driving force
during the ensuing years.

Tompkins experienced the ﬁrst turning point in her life when her family moved
from Manhattan to the suburbs. It was then She realized that the shape of her fear had
shifted to social ostracism (p. 51). She learned later that during that time She had been
given a social maturity test, which showed that, at eight years Old, she had the social

maturity of a 24 year old.

141

Ironically, Tompkins discovered during this period that relationships required a
signiﬁcant amount of work. It was not easy getting along with other people. She also
discovered that it was not the “horizontal” relationships, those with her peers, that
motivate her. It was the “vertical” relationships, those with adults and especially teachers,
that provided her driving force. She interpreted this period as explaining, at least
partially, why she had been motivated to be a teacher. Yet, as she reﬂected on this early
period of her life, little did she know how lonely a teacher’s life would prove to be.

Seeds of change were planted within Tompkins when she began her “new” life in
a “new” school. Mr. Bowler, her geometry teacher, proved to be the planter when he
asked the class to reﬂect on the meaning of Thanksgiving. As Tompkins recalled, “No
teacher had ever asked us to think about something as if our doing so would make a
difference. I felt we were being asked to put aside geometry because there was larger
work to be done, and we were the ones to do it” (p. 55).

Tompkins recalled Mr. Bowler’s use of the words knowledge and understanding.
This was her ﬁrst recollection of being challenged to think and to seek knowledge and
understanding. In addition to these intellectual challenges, she recalled feeling important.
Each class session was new and exciting, and she was made to feel important and
valuable. Part, if not all, of this She attributed to Mr. Bowler’s keeping his inner life in
order.

In addition to Mt. Bowler, Tompkin’s new school setting also introduced her to
teachers who loved what they taught. This was important to her future direction as she
was introduced to the discipline of literature during her time at that school. She said of

that time, “This kind of teaching inspired me because it reconﬁrmed my sense that

142

literature really was about life, and it gave me permission to express my unbounded
enthusiasm” (p. 61).

The seed planted by Mr. Bowler began to germinate and send forth roots. As
Tompkins settled into the routine of her new school, certain of her classes invigorated
her. As time passed, she discovered deep within herself a desire and a need to talk in
class. Part of this was motivated by a certain fear, a need to perform and please the
teacher. But another part, and a growing component at that, was her discovery that she
loved to perform in the presence of others. And talking in class was doing just that
(p. 63).

In this section, Tompkins came face to face with her own sense of fear, loneliness,
emptiness, and need to be loved. She was somewhat surprised by the hold these elements
had on her life. It was this “autobiographical process” (Brunet, 1995) that enabled her to
reﬂect critically (Mezirow, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) on her experience and learn from it as
she created her autobiographical narrative (Brady, 1990; Nelson, 1994). As she reﬂected
on her time at PS. 98 and speciﬁcally Mr. Bowler, she began to see the inﬂuence of

language on how she deﬁned herself (Freeman, 1993).

Language as a Means of JustifyingSelf-Existence

The realization or discovery regarding her need to perform was ontologically
foundational in that Tompkins discovered during these “performance” moments that she
felt like she existed. Language and the ﬂow thereof become instrumental for her, and She
found self-authentication in its use. She said of this discovery, “In that space of time,
borne up by the audience’s attention, my existence is guaranteed. 1 can’t not be,

intensely” (p. 63).

143

As she reﬂected brieﬂy on her mother, Tompkins saw seeds of her own needs and
longings in her mother as well. She said, “At any rate, my mother’s need to talk and be
listened to modeled my own. Talking was being; being was being listened to” (p. 64).
This partial syllogism, “talking is being; and being is being listened to,” drove Tompkins
to need to talk, almost at any expense. But in point of fact, the need and drive were so
intense that she was forced to encounter a whole new dimension of life. She said, “The
desperation points to something out of place. I think that in my upbringing, and almost
certainly in my mother’s, talking must have been a way to substitute for things that have
no words” (p. 65).

This journey through the realm of performance and the demands it makes on a
person led Tompkins to conclude that “to perform in order to survive existentially is
backbreaking work; to give up the burden of performance, an inexptessible relief”

(p. 65).

This personal revelation Tompkins shared with readers, the revelation regarding
the relationship among talking, language, and self-existence, marked the beginning of
what was to be a signiﬁcant life journey for her. This life journey would take her through
successes and failures both within and outside the classroom. It would affect her personal
as well as her professional relationships.

The ﬁrst stop on Tompkins’s journey was at Bryn Mawr, where she attended
college and began her stint in higher education. AS she looked back on these days, she
noticed that it was then that she began to separate her life into “professional” and
“personal” (p. 66), and in so doing began to neglect the personal in favor of the

professional.

144

The seed planted by Mr. Bowers when she was in high school was watered when
she encountered a woman named Jeannie. Tompkins recounted this relationship in the
following way:

I loved being with Jeannie, whose life, it seemed to me, went down several stories

deeper than anyone else’s I knew; Jeannie, who was Jewish, named things no one

else would. . . . She was my link to something, I didn’t know what, more alive and

real than anything I’d yet been in contact with. (p. 67)

This period of her life, in which she pursued formal higher education at both Bryn
Mawr and Yale, continued to water the seed planted by Mr. Bowers, but in an indirect
manner. Tompkins characterized Bryn Mawr as a sort of “Cloister” (p. 69). It was a safe
environment, set apart from the mundane realities of the world and everyday life. She
described it as follows: “It was a place where what I was good at counted, where I felt
challenged but also felt safe” (p. 69).

Yale, in comparison, served as her introduction to the world of higher education
as well as a reﬂection on the life of her soul. As an introduction to the world of higher
education, she encountered intense competition as well as the “proving ground” mentality
that dominates its organizational structure. As a reﬂection on the life of her soul,
Tompkins discovered that the arena of the “new criticism” would not allow her into the
realm of meaning. All questions were epistemological ones and had to be asked from the
viewpoint of an independent observer. She could not address the subject of meaning,
whether from the perspective of the author or that of the reader. Experiences to this point
continued to feed her growing convictions that there was a real and intangible quality to

language, and that its effective use could present meaning that might not be readily

apparent.

145

 

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The dramatic change that occurred in and to Tompkins was occasioned by a
comment from B. K. Moran, who asked Tompkins, “Don’t you believe in anything?”
(p. 84). Tompkins’s response to this was, “It was feminism that changed that” (p. 84).

In 1966, Tompkins received her Ph.D. and entered the higher education
workforce. Reﬂecting on that period, she attributed her grth both as a woman and as a
teacher to experience. No one teaches either how to be a woman or how to be a teacher.
For two years she struggled intensely with teaching and what it means to be a good
teacher.

But in all actuality, the struggle was with herself and who she was. Early on, she
deﬁned herself as an entertainer and the source of all wisdom and truth (p. 87). She
needed to have all the answers and to be conversant in so many areas in order to be
effective in the classroom. The need to feel accepted and intelligent was paramount. She
admitted, “And smart was the most important thing to be” (p. 89). But it was not just
“being smart” that Tompkins craved so desperately. She needed to feel accepted. She
said, “In return for the hard work I put into my classes, I wanted them to love me, to love
the material I taught, and to talk about it in a sophisticated way so that I would look good
by extension” Q). 90).

AS She moved through that period, she proceeded to do battle on two fronts. One
front was her battle with the fear of being found out. Everything she did, every project
she undertook, was designed to disguise the vast reservoir of ignorance she believed lay
within her. The other front was the battle of discovering just who in the world she really
was. Battle on this latter front led her through depression, that “dark night of the soul,”
divorce, and a job termination. During one of her darkest moments she stated, “There

must be something good about me” (p. 92).

146

Oddly enough, it was when Tompkins walked out on her husband that she began
to feel authentic, for she felt as though she had acted, made a willful decision, and canied
through with it for the ﬁrst time in her life. She said, “I left my husband and moved to
Hartford. As I drove up I-91 with my suitcases in the trunk, I felt I was acting for the ﬁrst
time in my life. It felt pure. Not because what I was doing was good, but because it was
completely self-willed” (p. 93).

The positive results of this act of self-authentication were short lived, however.
From this point forward, Tompkins’s journey took her over some fairly rough terrain. She
landed a teaching position at Temple University (p. 93), where she experienced an
emotional high as she prepared for and taught classes. But she also experienced the
depths of depression as she discovered the political nature of the tenure process, went
through a second divorce, and worked with her third psychiatrist.

In the next section, we see Tompkins begin to ﬁnd an outlet for her inward
struggle with meaning. Literary criticism that she had studied at Yale and that had
inﬂuenced her thinking ever Since had proven to be empty and void of meaning for her.
During her visit to the Modern Language Association annual meeting, Tompkins’s eyes
were opened to new work taking place that granted legitimacy to the reader and the
context within which the reading was taking place. Women’s studies and work related to
how meaning is conveyed from the written word to the reader’s head captured her
attention. Freeman (1993) worked with this theme when he sought to understand the self

that is constructed by language and generated in narrative (Josselson, I995).

147

Language as a Mechanism to Establish
Meaning and Understanding

And then it happened. A major change in Tompkins’s worldview occurred, a
change that resulted in a new and different interpretation of herself and her relationship
to, and with, other people. The change began at a meeting of the Modern Language
Association. AS she said,

At the meetings of the Modern Language Association, I became aware that things

were starting to happen in literary studies. There was women’s studies, which I

hadn’t yet awakened to, and something else, something to do with how people

read books, how the meaning gets from the words on the page into the readers’

heads. (p. 99)

She went on to say,

I think I had been waiting for something like this all my life. . ..To people who

studied literature, this new mode of thought meant that the meanings of words

could change depending on their context, which included who happened to be

reading them. (p. 101)

From that point forward, new vistas began to open in Tompkins’s life. She began
by walking out on her second marriage. As she worked through the psychotherapeutic
process, she discovered, “It was as though there was a lesson I was supposed to be
learning but it was up to me to guess what it was” (p. 103). In a sense, there was learning
taking place outside the classroom, and all her training and education to date had not
prepared her for that.

Her greatest need, Tompkins decided, was to be accepted and to be taken
seriously (p. 105). She simultaneously entered both her third marriage and
postmodernism. Her entry into postmodernism liberated her from viewing literary text in

and of itself, and allowed her the freedom to view context and meaning, something she

had been longing to be able to do.

148

She referenced a T-shirt a student gave her with the inscription, “Organic
Intellectual.” She said of this gift, “I was honored by this designation, for it put into
words exactly the kind of person I wanted to become” (p. 106). And in a certain sense her
story was one of the development of just such a person, an “organic intellectual.” The
designation “organic intellectual” and the reawakening of her literary soul gave
Tompkins the courage to “feel” in new and different ways, and to read previously read
material in new ways.

This became even more real to her after she had a dream in which the characters
and the interpretation she gave to them led her to realize that she was isolated and
alienated from herself and that she longed to be back and united with herself. This
interpretation was conﬁrmed by a woman Tompkins came to know as they commuted
together to Philadelphia. When Tompkins asked, “Well, how’s life treating you?” the
woman replied, “I don’t exist” (p. 111). This described Tompkins’s feelings of herself, as
well. Tompkins felt nonexistent.

Slowly but surely, the change within and outside of her continues. She and her
husband accepted positions at Duke and began the process of “settling in.” She noticed
early on that her introduction to postmodern criticism and feminism had given her both a
desire to ﬁght and an increased understanding that she was right. As She reﬂected on this
increased desire to ﬁght, she noticed that it was situated in a bed of intense anger. She
discovered that she was angry at everyone and everything. The seed Mr. Blower had
planted way back in high school was continuing to grow. The anger and need to ﬁght
manifested themselves physically as she began to struggle with migraine headaches. As

she said, “The headaches were a knock on the door of my life telling me I had to change”

(p.117)

149

This point of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical fatigue marked the
beginning of a new stage in Tompkins’s journey. Up to that point, the inner volcano, as it
were, had been boiling and burning and throwing out bits and pieces of molten lava. It
was now time for this volcano to erupt, and erupt it did. It began its “emptying out”
process when Tompkins realized, “The real change was taking place in my heart, in my
soul, somewhere between me and the trees in the forest where I walked” (pp. 117-118).

This change process manifested itself in Tompkins’s teaching life, when she
began to realize she needed to listen to the needs of the learner and focus her attention
there, as opposed to focusing solely on content and delivery. As she slowed down and
began to listen, she continued the “emptying out” process by trying a new teaching
technique, one she referred to as “no-frills” teaching (p. 120). This was simply a means of
transferring classroom authority from the teacher to the learner, but for her it was a major
change in her worldview.

Endemic to Tompkins’s changing worldview was her changing understanding of
herself. For the ﬁrst time in her life, she was beginning to realize she had to be herself.
She quoted Picasso as saying, “When you come right down to it, all you have is your
self” (p. 121). Together with this, she began to sense the need to quit acting and
attempting to portray a self that was not there.

Tompkins recognized that she was beginning to navigate in uncharted waters. She
quoted a woman who had studied with a Suﬁ master, who told her, “If the cup is empty, it
can be filled” (p. 124). That, for Tompkins, was symbolic of the journey she was taking.
She realized, “The moment of emptiness and terror had to occur. It was a death

preliminary to the start of something” (p. 122).

150

Tompkins related a struggle she had with T. S. Eliot’s writing during her period of
intense anger, brieﬂy described above. She spoke of identifying with Eliot everything she
hated in life (p. 115). Several years later she made an interesting discovery, which she
described in this way:

It was no accident, then, that years later when I ﬁnally discovered it was not

wrong to stick your chin out and to wear your heart on your sleeve, I embraced

exactly the kind of literature Eliot hated: books written by women, books millions
of people had loved, books that were full of feeling, books that changed people’s

minds by capturing their hearts. (p. 117)

As she recounted her struggles during that period, Tompkins reﬂected on a
Christmas dinner in 1958 during which she had recited some lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The
Family Reunion.” The following lines from that poem gripped her and would not let her
go: “You are the consciousness of your unhappy family, its bird sent ﬂying through the
purgatorial ﬂame” (p. 127). She recognized that moment to be representative of what she
was currently experiencing and said, “It is the moment I want most to avoid:
unconsciously reenacting on a public stage an inward drama of which I have no
knowledge” (p. 128).

The seed Mr. Bowler had planted continued to grow. Tompkins’s introduction to
postmodern thinking allowed her to embrace T. S. Eliot’s poetry through the mechanism
of her own feelings and longings and search for meaning. During that time, she ﬁnally
acknowledged to herself that “my fear of my students and of my colleagues was after all
a fear of myself” (p. 131). She had reached the bottom. The cup was empty. Now it was
time to ﬁll it.

As Tompkins described her growth in understanding, and her inner journey that

was taking place, she used some interesting images to describe both herself and the

process She was undertaking. With regard to herself, she reﬂected on different classes She

151

was teaching and various student responses to those classes. At one point she described
herself as the teacher Robin Williams portrayed in Dead Poets Society. who was ﬁred
because he was too innovative and successful. Tompkins also was teaching contrary to
the norm, and some students were responding to her approach. All of her experiences,
whether in the classroom or with individual students, led her to recognize the
inadequacies of narrative to explain all of this. AS a result, for the ﬁrst time in her life,
she began to experience the magic of poetry (p. 141).

As Tompkins continued to experiment within her classroom and transfer more
and more control to the learner, she also continued to struggle with fear. Coping with her
new-found freedom was not easy for her. Often she found herself longing for the security
associated with the highly structured classroom, symbolized by neatly aligned rows of
desks and chairs. This fear and inner uneasiness led Tompkins to the discipline of karate.
She reasoned,

I thought perhaps if I mastered, or acquired some skill in, a martial art, the

external competence would affect me internally, give me the ability to stand up

for myself, to stop assuming all the power was on the other side, to meet

confrontation ﬁrmly instead of avoiding it. (p. 156)

But through this discipline she discovered something else. Regarding the martial-arts
stances and movements as well as the ritual preparation, she said, “The essence of the
forms is not in the spectacle they create but in how they feel to the practitioner” (p. 157).

Tompkins compared karate with learning a Western science. Each uses a
sequential, step-by-step process. But the paramount difference is that

karate is practiced with, and in, the body. The steps alter the person who performs

them; you become the tradition, you become the rules. You become your own

master. . . . Though it begins and is carried on in the physical realm, it ends by
training your soul. (p. 159)

152

Karate helped to transform Tompkins’s understanding of what she was trying to
do in the classroom. Up to that point in her journey, she had allowed chaos to exert more
authority than it should. Her objective had been to help her students discover their “true”
selves, and in so doing she had allowed freedom to reign in her classroom. What karate
revealed to her was the fact that the self is liberated by imposing a set of formal
constraints (p. 159). Tompkins’s experience with karate led her to conclude that “To be
empowering, discipline must be chosen” (p. 160).

As the seed that Mr. Bowler had planted continued to grow, a course Tompkins
taught, entitled “American Literature Unbound,” became the stage on which one of the
ﬁnal acts of her personal play was reenacted. It was one of the ﬁnal acts because this was
the stage on which Tompkins’s greatest fear was exposed, that of being “found out.” And
She did not reﬂect on this course in a casual, “arm chair,” fashion. Rather, she recognized
this was an experience she needed to relive in an attempt to see what it was telling her
and then, horror upon horrors, do something about it.

It was during this last leg of her journey, the time when the seed that Mr. Bowler
had planted started to push through the soil, that this greatest of all awakenings occurred.
Tompkins began by acknowledging that it was difﬁcult to tell a straight story (p. 162). It
became apparent to her that life iS not about experiences but rather how one interprets
these experiences (Kegan, 1980). She recognized, “The ego’s need to be reﬂected one
way or the other intrudes everywhere” (p. 163). But tell the story of this course she must.
AS she said, “I’ve realized that the story of this course is about issues that have long lain

dormant in my life, at the bottom of the pool inside me, like monsters in a fairy tale”

(p. 163).

153

Tompkins acknowledged this course to be a sort of text, “beautiful, strange, many
layered, frightening—woven out of the memory and desire of every person in the room”
(p. 163). But more important, she acknowledged the existence of an even deeper text.
“The deep text was my own need to feel accepted by the students. To be part of
something they were part of. Not to be alone” (p. 165).

Recounting this course and the events that surrounded it was not easy for
Tompkins. As she ventured further into this experience, she recognized her overpowering
love for Melville and the subject of language. As she reﬂected upon her dissertation, she
noticed how passages related to anger in Melville’s writings affected her. She recognized
the existence of anger deep within herself, so deep, in fact, she had not been aware it was
there.

But what struck Tompkins the hardest as she reﬂected on all of this was her
recognition that this class was actually doing language and not just talking about it
(p. 172). This was paramount for her, for part of her self-authentication came through her
will. Earlier she had discussed how liberating it had been to leave her husband (p. 93), in
large because she had acted. Now, she found herself and the class acting and exerting
their respective wills in the process of doing language.

And then it happened. The students were asked to critique the class. The result
was a highly critical appraisal of the class that left Tompkins deﬂated and discouraged.
She said,

Another person might have taken it better, not been so sensitive. But the students

had unknowingly found me out. Criticism was what I’d been trying to avoid all

along, criticism of any kind—literary criticism, criticism of myself as a teacher,

my having to criticize them. (p. 176)

She acknowledged,

154

They got me, all right, maybe in the deepest place. Taking criticism too much to

heart, wanting to be free from it entirely. All along I’d known in the abstract that I

taught from places inside me that needed healing. Well, here was my chance, in

the aftermath of their evaluations, to forgive myself for fearing judgment so

much, to forgive myself for wanting to escape. (p. 177)

Through this experience she dived “into the pool where rage, self-absorption, loneliness,
the need for ego gratiﬁcation, and fear of criticism lurked” (p. 178), waiting for her. She
had met the enemy, and it was herself.

In the wake of this discovery, Tompkins picked herself up, looked around, and
began to focus on her interpersonal relationships. Before then, her focus had been almost
exclusively intrapersonal. She started by comparing the community that existed within
her class to the community that existed within her department at Duke. She spoke of
noticing “an absence of social and emotional housekeeping” (184). Tompkins described
the university workplace as a type of “war zone” (p. 189) and quickly concluded that
competition had taken the place of peace. And she recognized that her inner feeling of
loneliness was only exacerbated by the lack of community at her university.

AS she began to look without herself, Tompkins noticed several other things. One
was the speed at which she was living her life. She said, “I was attacking things in a
crouched position, hurrying, worrying, and not feeling anything—certainly not the sun, or
the breeze, or how the earth felt” (p. 198). She noticed further that one of her primary
motivations for doing something was to see herself mirrored in achievement (p. 199).
Any activity that did not lead directly to this achievement she considered an interruption
and not to be undertaken. But then she recalled a passage from one of Henri Nouwen’s

books, in which he shared a personal discovery to the effect that interruptions, rather than

taking him away from his work, were in fact an integral part of his work. Tompkins said

155

 

 

 

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of this discovery, “The acceptance of interruption as one’s work implies a consciousness
not wedded to its own purposes” (p. 200).

Part and parcel with this discovery related to work interruption and time was
Tompkins’s discovery that effective living is as much communal as it is instrumental. She
said,

My sense of reality has begun to change where questions of work and time are

concerned. More and more I believe I am devoting myself to the moment. Less

and less can I support activity that is purely instrumental—do this now so that

later you can do that. (p. 205)

Tompkins concluded her autobiography by focusing on the theme of
“instrumental versus communal.” She lamented an educational system that had taken
away students’ initiative. Today, students are concerned about the future and their own
employability. Education is a means to an end, that end being meaningful and gainful
employment. As a result of, or perhaps driving this situation, education today provides
little, if any, help in the development of students’ self-knowledge.

Tompkins ﬁnished by calling for more in the way of active learning. Education
today is compartmentalized, so her call was for more integration, education that is more
holistic in its perspective. No one is taught how to feel, or what to do with feelings.
Education is much more an information dump—knowledge about, as opposed to
knowledge that. If anything, the university should be a training ground for life, and not
just for career. Tompkins summed things up with this observation:

Having a problem with yourself is the existential dilemma, the human condition.

Learning to deal with our own suffering is the beginning of wisdom. I didn’t learn

this—that is, that I had to start with myself—until I was in my late forties. I could

have begun sooner. (p. 221)

AS a result of this “autobiographical process” (Brunet, 1995), Tompkins learned

several Signiﬁcant lessons:

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1. Tompkins discovered early in her writing that the learning that came from and
through experience was not the same type of learning that is referred to in an academic
sense. She discerned in this process that a combination of narrative, imagination, and
interpretation lends itself to the process of understanding. No new information is attained,
only understanding.

2. Part and parcel of Tompkins’s discovery that learning from and through
experience was a valid form of learning was her growing awareness of how formative her
days at PS. 98 had been. AS she reﬂected and wrote, she came to see how signiﬁcant her
fear of failure and her lack of love and acceptance had been to her then and still were
now.

3. Finally, through all of this, Tompkins came to recognize the importance of
language and the instrumental role it plays in the construction of the self in general and
her self in particular. It can be a trap or it can be used to create something new and
different. Some have spoken of the use of language in hermeneutics and the interpretive
process (Freeman, 1993; Ricoeur, 1984). Others have spoken of its use in the imaginative
act of creating narrative (Conway, 1998; Dickerson, 1989; Eakin, 1999; Freeman, 1993;
Gomick, 2001a; Hampl, 1999; Metzger, 1992; Nelson, 1994). For Tompkins, language

was the instrument with which she created meaning.

M

We have seen in this chapter how two authors used the “autobiographical
process” (Brunet, 1995) to transform their lives. The creation of life stories or personal

narratives (Brunet, 1987, 1995, 1999; McAdams, 1993, 1996) enabled Snyder and

Tompkins to rewrite their lives (Freeman, 1993) and identify an inner plot (Conway,

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1998) through the effective use of a narrative imagination (Freeman, 1993; Metzger,
1992)

The impetus for the learning process was different for Snyder and Tompkins. For
Snyder, the impetus originated in a signiﬁcant change in his life circumstance (Spear &
Mocker, 1984). The loss of a prestigious position at a renowned university set him on his
way. For Tompkins, the impetus originated with a change of heart (Brookﬁeld, 1986), an
inner disquiet that caused her to reassess her personal strategies in particular, and the
goals of education in general. For both authors, a change in their situation gave rise to a
new story (Gomick, 2001a).

Whether it was searching and coming to grips with the idea that life is more about
accommodation than fate, as Snyder did, or recognizing the role and limits of language in
the development of self-knowledge, as Tompkins did, we see the role of self-directed,
independent, and autonomous learning at work in each case. For both authors, the process
of reﬂecting and imaginatively creating from memory enabled them to reconstruct a
sense of unity over the course of time (Brady, 1990) and discover meaning (Gomick,
2001b) and purpose (Conway, 1998) in their individual lives.

Hampl (1999) said of Edith Stein that Stein refused to divulge, “even to her best
friend, what she knew each person must ﬁnd alone, in the locked tabernacle of the self”
(p. 128). In the cases of Snyder and Tompkins, the knowing came as a result of the
divulging. For them, language transformed experience into meaning, which is what
learning is all about.

The irony in these two autobiographies is this. Both Snyder and Tompkins were
academicians who had dedicated their lives to the pursuit of goals and dreams related to

the academy and their involvement in it. Both found, however, as they created their

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autobiographies, that their most signiﬁcant learning had taken place outside the conﬁnes
of the academy. Learning for them could not be institutionalized. In fact, learning that
derives from experience and memory, and leads to meaning and understanding, deﬁes the
rigidity of any institutional boundaries.

Neither Snyder nor Tompkins spent any time studying or doing research in the
ﬁeld of education, nor did they avail themselves of the language endemic to the
educational community. Yet both lives reﬂected the change and transformation that so
often occurs as a result of self-directed learning activities.

These two authors used the results of their respective autobiographical processes
(Brunet, 1995) to redirect their future efforts. For Snyder, this amounted to discovering
that life was more about accommodation than about fate, and using this discovery to
shape for himself a life of manual labor and free-lance writing, both from without the
academy. His story was summed up so beautifully in one of the last conversations he
related with his son Jack. He said, “‘And it’s the work, Jack’ I said. ‘You do the work
the right way even if you’re working for a jerk’” (p. 264). To arrive at that conclusion
required little advancement in knowing about anything. But it required huge strides in the
understanding of everything.

For Tompkins, using the autobiographical process to redirect her future efforts
amounted to discovering that education was missing the mark. She said of that discovery,
“Having a problem with your self is the existential dilemma, the human condition.
Learning to deal with our own suffering is the beginning of wisdom. I didn’t learn this—
that is, that I had to start with myself—until I was in my late forties. I could have begun

sooner” (p. 221). As for Snyder so too for Tompkins, the result of her “autobiographical

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process” (Brunner, 1995) took her to new levels of understanding. But unlike Snyder, she

was able to bring this learning back into the academy in an attempt to effect change.

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CHAPTER 5
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING: SOME CONCLUSIONS

Self-Construction and the Revelatory Power of Language

According to Freeman (1993), the poet’s role is to rewrite the world in such a way
that the person who reads the poet can locate himself or herself in the poet’s rewritten
world. This is achieved when the reader ﬁnds himself or herself learning, seeing, or
feeling something different about the world that, for all intents and purposes, might have
gone unnoticed had it not been for the poet.

The same seems to hold for autobiography and personal narrative. Upon
completing each of these six autobiographies, we are left with the sense that something
unique has been discovered that might not have been discovered in any other way.
Reﬂecting on, learning from, and writing about personal experience have made this
discovery possible. Through the revelatory power inherent in language, there is an ability
in narrative to go beyond appearance, to probe, to look at something in depth. Individual
understanding is taken to a deeper level.

Through the writing of autobiographies, authors undertake a process through
which they seek to redeﬁne the boundaries between foundationalism and hermeneutics,
and between science and art. Through the use of their narrative imaginations, authors
endeavor to uncover, articulate, and describe a world that would undoubtedly not have
existed were it not for the creation of their own narratives.

The objective that authors attempt to achieve is one of disclosure. They seize
upon what is currently available to them and, through the use of the imagination and

language, transform it. Their goal is to say something meaningful about the world that

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heretofore has not been said, and would have gone unsaid were it not for their attempt to
create their personal narrative. In the process they take both their own and the reader’s
understanding to a new level. Freeman (1993) referred to this as a “herrneneutically
imaginative dimension” (p. 231).

Each of the autobiographies examined in this study was a sort of allegory. In each
instance, a particular situation was universalized to such an extent that it became a story
applicable to many lives. In fact, this may be one of the primary roles of allegory—to
take a particular situation and make it into story.

According to Sayers (1963), “Allegory is a distinct literary form, whose aim and
method is to dramatize a psychological experience, so as to make it more vivid and more
comprehensible” (p. 202). She went on to say that an allegory

tells a literal story which is complete in itself, but which also presents a likeness

to some spiritual or psychological experience, so that it can be used to signify and

interpret that experience; and the story is told, not for its own sake, but for the
sake of what it signiﬁes. At the bottom of all such stories there lies this perception
of a likeness between two experiences, the one familiar and the other unfamiliar,

so that the one can be used to shed light on the other. (p. 202)

Earlier I cited a reference alluding to a statement attributed to Henry James. The
comment was, “It is probably in this sense that Henry James intended his famous remark
that adventures happen only to people who know how to tell them” (Brunet, 1999,

p. 163). In similar manner, Taylor (1996) claimed, “There is no story until there is a
telling” (p. 15). It is the autobiographical act, an act of imaginative creation, that
precipitates meaning and understanding.

In light of these comments, and as a result of this study, I concluded that perhaps
learning happens only to people who know how to articulate what it is they have learned.

Part of what is required is the ability to reﬂect on one’s past experience in an attempt to

see and understand how what has been experienced has helped to conceptualize and form

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the present. Also, it must be noted that good autobiography depends on the narrative
skills of the one writing the autobiography. The interpretive tools and skills needed to
build a solid ediﬁce of meaning and understanding are themselves developed and reﬁned
through the process of living.

The autobiography as a unique genre permits a number of transactions to take
place. In this genre, scenes and events dominate the narrative, much more so than do
ideas. The language used and the images created serve to “suggest” meaning and
understanding. They do not demand it. In fact, it is more accurate to say that meaning and
understanding are not imposed on the text, but rather they emerge from it (Howarth,
1980)

Also, meaning and understanding are as dependent on the receiver as they are on
the sender. To arrive at the conclusion that meaning and understanding have taken place
in the life of the author, the author must form a connection or “pact” (Eakin, 1989) with
the reader. Through the effective use of language, the author recaptures experiences and
gives them new life in such a manner that entirely new signiﬁcance results. In
Augustinian terms, the past surrenders to present exegesis (Howarth, 1980).

Hampl brought this point home when She wrote about a woman she remembered
from when she was growing up in St. Paul. She used to pass this woman every day on her
way to the local parochial school. She described her in the following manner. She was a
“parish lady, part of the anonymous population that thickened our world, people who
were always there, who were solidly part of us, part of what we were, but who never
emerged beyond the bounds of being parishioners to become full-ﬂedged persons”

(p. 51). She continued, “The parish lady was not a nun. She was a person who prayed,

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who prayed alone, for no reason that I understood. But there was no question that she
prayed without ceasing, as the strange scriptural line instructed” (p. 52).

What makes this episode especially poignant is how Hampl described the “parish
lady’s” gaze as they passed each other on the street. She said, “It was not an invasive
look, but it latched. She had me. Not an intrusive gaze, but one brimming with a secret
which, if only she had the words, it was clear she ’d want to tell’ ’ (italics added) (p. 52).

“If only she had the words, it was clear she’d want to tell” (Hampl, p. 52). This, in
part, is what writing an autobiography is all about. The autobiography is not an event;
neither is it an object, something to be sold at a bookstore. Rather, it is a process, a
lifelong process of giving words or expression to experience (Brunet, 1995). It is a
process of setting the author free from the bondage and tyranny that exist when he or she
does not have the words to express himself or herself. It is a process that involves
deconstruction as well as reconstruction. It is a process that is never ﬁnished, but always
“just begun.” The autobiographical process begins with conviction, becomes a sense of
urgency, and results in scripted text. But the text takes on a life of its own. The very act
of creation, an imaginative process, takes the author to a new level of understanding.

Hampl talked about discovery being a kind of miracle (p. 121). In a sense, all six
of these authors encountered a change in their respective worldviews as they each made a
discovery of sorts. They became new people through the agency of their autobiographies.
In addition, they realized that it is out of individual perception and not blood ties that
solidarity is formed (Hampl, p. 121).

Finally, Conway (1998) quoted an essay that Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote about

Gertrude Stein, in which she said that Stein was “doing with words, what Picasso is doing

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with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing

so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history” (p. 117).

Common Themes

In a certain sense, each of these autobiographies is a “work in progress.” Each
represents an individual author’s efforts to bestow meaning and signiﬁcance on
experiences that at the outset do not seem to have much meaning and signiﬁcance. Hone
(1979) said of this endeavor,

Every biographical study is an interim report, for the simple reason that each

biographer measures another’s foot by his own last. Like translation, biography

ineluctably comes Short of the subject. “Who do you say that I am?” was a

question that of necessity elicited several points of view.(p. ix)

The same can be said of the autobiography. It, too, is an interim report of sorts,
and it, too, can be viewed through any number of different lenses. Each of the six
situations reviewed in this study was unique, but the stories that resulted were similar in
several respects. In this section, my plan is to draw attention to some of the common
aspects of these narratives.

An author fulﬁlls two fundamental roles when writing an autobiography. As
Howarth (1980) said, “The common manifestation of a strong and principled character
determines the person’s two didactic roles: as narrator, he teaches his prime lesson; as
protagonist, he relives and learns from his days of win or error” (p. 92).

In this process, the past surrenders its soul to present exegesis. Each
autobiography is a process of interpreting past experience through the interpretive
structure of the present. The author functions both as narrator and as protagonist. As

narrator, the author sweeps across the historical landscape and views events and

relationships in retrospect. From this perspective, many events and relationships are seen

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ﬁtting together, making more sense, and beginning to reveal a sort of “inner plot”
(Conway, 1998). AS a protagonist, the author relives events and relationships that
transpired some time in the past and begins the process of remaking himself or herself
(Brunet, 1987, 1995; McAdams, 1993, 1996). It is the combination of these two roles that
permits learning to take place, and such learning is based on experience.

The beauty of these autobiographies is established upon the fact that, when all is
said and done, when the autobiography draws to a close, the narrator and the protagonist
emerge as one and the same person. The “teaching” self and the “experiencing” self are
wedded, brought together in the presence of the reader in such a fashion that the reader is
forced to respond.

Each of these six autobiographies reﬂects a difference in situation, but a similarity
in story (Gornick, 2001a). The situations vary not only in space and time, but also in the
areas of meaning and signiﬁcance. Each life is distinctive and comprises a unique set of
problems, challenges, and predicaments. But from each unique situation a story is
created. And each story shares with the others some common themes. They may vary in
emphasis and intensity, but they are there. The following is a description of some of the

more common themes.

Agency and Communion

McAdams (1993) talked about agency and communion as being two principal
themes in personal myths. Agentic motives, he argued, are built around the themes of
power and achievement. Themes of independence, mastery, and justice also are made
manifest through agentic motives. By contrast, communal motives are built around such

themes as love, patience, interdependence, and responsibility.

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It

All six authors whose autobiographies were reviewed for this research exhibited a
movement, no matter how small it might be, from more to less agentic motives, and from
less to more communal motives. Through the mechanism of their own unique and varied
experiences, they came to new and greater understandings of the need for and the
meaning of community, interdependence, and responsibility. Through their unique self-
directed learning processes, they anived at a greater appreciation of both the need for and
the role of community in providing needed encouragement, direction, information, and
support.

Rugged individualism, to whatever extent it existed, fell apart for each author.
Whether it was through making a religious pilgrimage, struggling with illness, or facing a
mid-career transition, each author came to realize the importance of community in
support, encouragement, and collaboration.

Gomick (2001a) wrote about the narrator being an agent who directs the reader
through the narrative. In a sense, all six Of these authors moved from personal themes of
agency to personal themes of communion. In the process, the authors ﬁlled the role of
agents for the process. Speciﬁc examples of this notion are given in the following
paragraphs.

In A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, Tompkins invited readers to join
her on this reﬂective journey. She started seeking to possess in order to produce.
Throughout her whole educational experience, for example, she obtained educational
degrees in an effort to attain prestigious faculty positions and, ultimately, to hide her deep
fear of “being found out.” All of these were agentic motives she unleashed to meet her
need for achievement, mastery, and independence. By the end of her narrative, however,

Tompkins had, in a sense, recognized the “folly” of her ways. Her language and life

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direction had moved in the direction of community—themes of interdependence and
interconnectivity. For example, she recognized just how “unﬁiendly” her department at
Duke was, and how not everyone was not motivated to build community.

In An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. Jamison summarized the
changes that took place over the course of writing her autobiography.

When I ﬁrst thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about

moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have

written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love

as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. (p. 215)

She moved from wanting to write about MDI, thereby fulﬁlling the agentic role of
independence and mastery, to actually sharing her experiences with the illness. This
aspect of sharing helped Jamison arrive at the conclusion that her autobiography was
more about love and acceptance, a communal theme.

“The necessary focus on the self, therefore, encourages a rhetoric of agency in
many autobiographical narratives, especially among contemporary Americans imbued
with an ethic of individualism” (McAdams, 1996). Similarly, Conway (1998) referred to
voice in an autobiography as “the product of inner agency” (p. 126). She said of
autobiographical creation,

We travel through life guided by an inner life plot—part the creation of family,

part the internalization of broader social norms, part the function of our

imaginations and our own capacity for insight into ourselves, part from our
groping to understand the universe in which the planet we inhabit is a speck.

When we Speak about our memories, we do so through literary forms that seem to

capture universals in human experience—the quest, the romance, the odyssey, the

tragic or the comic mode. (p. 177)

Active Engagement and Narrative Creation

Each author experienced both the need to become, and the process of becoming, a

participant in his or her particular situation. In fact, it was this process of becoming a

168

participant that yielded their particular stories. Each story was an account of how one
must move from the role of observer to participant in order to gain understanding and
meaning. As Donnie said to Hampl on numerous occasions, “You have to get in there.”
Whether they chose their experience, as Hampl, Heilman and Tompkins did, or whether it
was thrust upon them, as it was for Price, Snyder, and Jamison, the need to become
involved was paramount in the unveiling of meaning. As Palmer (2000) said, “If you
can’t get out of it, get into it” (p. 84).

Some examples of this phenomenon include the following. Heilman learned early
on the meaning and signiﬁcance of the act and process of lernen. Growth in wisdom and
understanding is available to any Jewish person who is willing to engage in the process.
Heilman said, “No Jew could hope to ﬁnd salvation except by climbing out of the exile of
ignorance and into the redemptive light of lernen. Study was no longer the practice just of
scholars but was for everyone a lifetime mission” (p. 25).

Menachem Reichler opened Heilman’s understanding to the idea of the Torah as a
means to an end rather than an end in and of itself.

You acquired a great deal: you learned nothing. If you have come to acquire

Torah as if it were one of the subjects you learned in the university, you will

never learn it. The Torah is the way to reach the Master of the Universe. It is a
pathway, not an acquisition. You will never ﬁnish it; you will never get a degree.

(p.117)

Rizhyner Rebbe emphasized the fact that individual and independent study is the
source of internal light.

That is just as when a man walks through the woods on a dark night, and for a
time another joins him, lantern in hand, but at the crossroads they part and the
ﬁrst must grope his way on alone. But if a man carries his own light with him, he
need not be afraid of any darkness. DO you understand? It is time for you to stop
looking for someone else to lead you, for someone else’s lantern. You must at last
learn to study on your own. (p. 158)

169

Hampl experienced some breakthroughs in understanding and invited readers to
share in some captivating insights she had attained during the course of her journey. An
example of this is her insight into the concept of vocation, what it means to be truly alive.
She said of this, “Observation alone, the life of looking. . . . Life, fundamentally, was
neither active nor passive. It was contemplative. . . . Pondering was the highest
vocation”(p. 62).

Active engagement in the process of living amounts to pondering, the process of
both critical reﬂection and self-reﬂection, whereby the individual soul opens its arms to
the possibility of new and variegated possibilities. In essence, life is neither active,
always doing, nor passive, always receiving, but rather contemplative, actively engaging.

Also, from the standpoint of an independent observer, Donnie oﬁen reminded
Hampl that she must become involved. “You have to get in there,” was her cry. This was
very similar to Palmer’s (2000) injunction, cited above, “If you can’t get out of it, get into
it” (p. 84).

Finally, at the end of his autobiography, Price shared with readers some
signiﬁcant insights. One of them pertained to the call for involvement. His call,
speciﬁcally related to illness, was for readers to actively “dig” themselves out of their
predicaments. No one else was going to help.

You’re in your present calamity alone, as far as this life goes. If you want a way

out, then dig it yourself, if there turns out to be any trace of a way. Nobody—least

of all a doctor—can rescue you now, not from the deeps of your own mind, not

once they’ve stitched your gaping wound. (p. 182)

For each of these authors, the very act of writing, of creating text, gave form to an
otherwise amorphous mass of meaningless and seemingly insigniﬁcant experience. In

addition, writing was a willful act that each author undertook in an effort to take his or

her situation public. The very act of disclosure is liberating and transforming.

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It

In her autobiography, An Unguiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness,
Jamison invited readers to Share her fear of going public. She said,

I have no idea what the long-terrn effects of discussing such issues so openly will

be on my personal and professional life, but, whatever the consequences, they are

bound to be better than continuing to be silent. I am tired of hiding, tired of
misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as

though I have something to hide. (p. 7)

The reader senses no hesitation here. In fact, the pain Jamison had harbored deep
within herself by not speaking out jumps from the page and demands attention.

As she completed her autobiography, Jamison shared with readers just how
different her Story was because of the act of narrative creation. The very act of creating
text opened her eyes to something she had not seen before. Essentially, what started as a
scientiﬁc endeavor related to MDI ended as a piece of artistic self-expression related to
love and the Signiﬁcance of personal relationships.

In her Epilogue, Jamison commented, “I have often asked myself whether, given
the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. . . . Strangely enough I think
I would choose to have it” (p. 217). The creation of text, the telling of her story, the
extraction of meaning from her situation—all of these elements combined to enable
Jamison to reﬂect and tell her readers she would not change a thing.

In his autobiography, A Whole New Life: An Illness and 3 Healing, Price told his
readers that, upon discovering his illness, he had been at a loss to ﬁnd any sort of written
narrative by someone else who had ventured through a similar trying situation. As a
result, he took it upon himself to create this documentation. He said,

That aim is to give, in the midst of an honest narrative, a true record of the visible

and invisible ways in which one fairly normal creature entered a trial, not of his

choosing, and emerged after a long four years on a new life—a life that’s almost
wholly changed from the old. (p. vii)

171

Ironically, what began as a sort of objective documentary ended as the telling of a

story, a story of transformation and change. Essentially, it was the account of the creation

of a new life, from the ashes and burning rubble of one overrun by cancer. But from

physical pain and suffering emerged emotional and spiritual strength and vitality. Price

said of his “inner” change because of his “outer” situation, “First, paraplegia with its

maddening limitations has forced a degree of patience and consequent watchfulness on

me, though as a writer I’d always been watchful” (p. 189).

Price discovered, as did Jamison, that he would not exchange anything. The

experience had been necessary and worthwhile. In fact, the creation of a “new” person

from the experience contributed to an increase in his productivity.

But the fact that, in ten years since the tumor was found, I’ve completed thirteen
books—I’d published a ﬁrst twelve in the previous twenty-two years—would
seem at least another demonstration that human energy, without grave loss, may
ﬂow from one form into another and win the same consoling gains. (The question
of why and how I was able to increase my rate is unanswerable, by me anyhow—
a race with death and silence, a massive rerouting of sexual energy would be the
easy answers. But if I was racing, I never felt chased; panic came elsewhere but
never in my work. On the contrary, I sense strongly that the illness itself either
unleashed a creature within me that had been restrained and let him run at his own
hungry will; or it planted a whole new creature in place of the old.) (pp. 190-191)

It is highly unlikely that any steps can be taken to adequately prepare a person for -

life’s experiences. In Yeats’s words,

For some months now I have lived with my own youth and childhood, not always
writing indeed but thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful and
disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished too few of my plans, for I am not
ambitious; but when I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I
have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents,
and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life
seems to me a preparation for something that never happens. (as cited in Howarth,
1980,p.112)

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The irony here is that the authors whose accounts were reviewed in this study seemed to
say that their own lives had been a lack of preparation for something that did happen. The
process of capturing this seemed to be what learning was all about.

As Brunet (1995) said, “I have no grand conclusion to offer save that
autobiography is life construction through ‘text’ construction. . . . I persist in thinking that
autobiography is an extension of ﬁction, rather than the reverse, that the shape of life

comes ﬁrst from imagination rather than from experience” (p. 176).

Location and Relation

Unique to each autobiography reviewed in this study was the location in which
the narrative was situated. Or perhaps it was the location that gave rise to the narrative.
Hampl traveled to Italy to retrace the steps of St. Francis of Assisi. Then, a year later, she
spent a week in a monastery in California. It was during that time in the monastery that
her story seemed to come together and take shape. When she walked out of there, She
knew that what her friend Donnie had said all along was true: “You have to get in there.”

Heilman wrote his autobiography after having lived in Jerusalem. His experiences
there enabled him to establish a number of connections with his past. These connections,
in turn, enabled him to identify more closely with various communities in Jerusalem and
ultimately with his tradition and heritage. The process of uncovering and making those
connections was what gave rise to his autobiography or story.

Jamison used trips to England as times to pull herself together and regroup. These
excursions served not only as means to escape her hectic life style in southern California,
but also to refocus her thinking. Jamison also used these times in England to make some

life-changing decisions. It was after her year-long sabbatical in England that she realized

173

it was time to leave UCLA. Shortly after returning home, she moved to Washington, DC.
with her new husband.

Location also played an important role in Snyder’s autobiography. After leaving
Colgate, he retreated to Maine to begin his process of pulling things together. Maine’s
beaches, parks and terrain provided an almost ideal setting for an autobiography of this
sort. A major turning point in Snyder’s story occurred when his wife Colleen rented a
cottage on the beach for the family. This took place during the depths of Snyder’s 11-
month bout with depression, when his whole world had come to a standstill. This change
in location, coupled with other events, served as a beginning to his recovery process and
his personal transformation.

In her autobiography, Tompkins took her readers on a variety of excursions to
numerous locations. Centered on the east coast, she traveled from Bryn Mawr to Yale to
Temple to Duke in her academic career. She lived in Connecticut, New York,
Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. It was her ﬁnal stop, at Duke in North Carolina, where
Tompkins began to pull things together. In particular, it was a class that she took to a
motel off campus that generated critical comments about her and stimulated some
important and serious self-reﬂection on her part.

Finally, Price, because of the nature of his illness, was conﬁned to one location in
North Carolina. But this lack of variety in his physical surroundings stimulated him to
search the conﬁnes of his memory. He recalled people, places, and things to mind in a
descriptive manner. In fact, when he was at one of the lowest points in his journey to
recovery, he called on his cousin Marcia and asked to stay at her house. This change in

environment, together with her care, enabled him to begin the recovery process.

174

With respect to the theme of relation and relationship, in each of these
autobiographies, as themes of agency gave way to themes of communion, so too did the
importance of interpersonal relationship grow. All six of these authors recognized in their
own distinct ways the importance of others to their respective journeys.

Hampl’s autobiography was a continual unfolding of new meanings that she
derived from past and new relationships. Donnie, for example, played a signiﬁcant role in
guiding her in a quiet and unobtrusive manner. Hampl said of her,

Donnie. . . . She’s been a contemplative nun since she was seventeen. Not a

woman easily rattled. No doubt she sees my grouchiness as “the spiritual part.” I

can’t ﬁgure her. Yet I keep going back to visit her, to sort out what I thought was

the past, my dead Catholic past, only to ﬁnd it isn’t dead at all. (p. 7)

Early on, Donnie offered Hampl some sound, wise, and signiﬁcant advice. “Donnie’s
opinion: Don’t get complicated, quit trying to ﬁgure out what you believe, just follow
your instinct” (p. 16).

As she moved forward in her journey, Hampl took notice of some Franciscans
traveling with her tour group. As she watched them interact, she noticed how important
interpersonal relationships were to them. She said, “They weren’t ‘living in history’ with
its throwaway pageant of changing characters. Rather, in this Franciscan world there was
only the eternity of primal relationships” Q). 119). Further examples include Hampl’s
relationship with both Felix, a friar taking the Assisi excursion, and Andre, the chaplain
at Rosethom. Her encounters with both of these men left her a different person.

Heilman also placed signiﬁcant emphasis on the personal encounters he
experienced while traveling in Jerusalem. Each one of these people showed him
something new, helped him connect with his past, or helped him appropriate a deeper

understanding for himself. Heilman’s signiﬁcant relationships began with the rabbi of his

“home” congregation, who had encouraged Heilman to journey out and forward for most

175

of his “growing up” life. It all came to a head one day when he gave Heilman a challenge
he could not refuse to accept. The rabbi told him, “No Jew could hope to ﬁnd salvation
except by climbing out of the exile of ignorance and into the redemptive light of lernen.

Study was no longer the practice just of scholars but was for everyone a lifetime mission’
(p. 25).

Early into his journey, Heilman met Rav Ktol. His relationship with that man was
instrumental in helping to ignite within the depths of his being a hunger to study and to
learn from the ancient texts. Not long after that, Heilman encountered Reb Yose Moshe,
who opened his eyes and heart to the real purpose of studying. He recalled this encounter
in the following way: “You see,” Reb Yose Moshe began, “it’s the same with a sefer. A
holy book can be worn, the light inside it can still shine brightly if you know how to lern
it out” (p. 98).

These are just two examples of signiﬁcant relationships that dramatically
inﬂuenced Heilman’s life and direction. Many more can be found within his
autobiography, for essentially the book is an account of relationships and their effect on
his lernen.

Autobiography and Self-Directed Learning . . . Observations and
Classroom Implications

The relationship between self-directed learning and personal narrative is not
always direct. This may be due, in part at least, to both the different ways in which
people writing in these areas conceptualize problems and use language. For example,
those writing in the area of self-directed learning are prone to use terms the likes of
“critical reﬂection” (Brookﬁeld, 1985; Mezirow, 1990a), “experience” (Kolb, 1984),

“meaning schemes” (Mezirow, 1991, 1995), “perspective transformation” (Mezirow,

176

1990b, 1991, 1995), “learning” (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, 1999), “autonomy” (Chene,
1983; Merriam & Caffarella, 1999), “personal traits” (Brockett & Hiemstra, 1991;
Candy, 1991; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, 1999), and “the learning process” (Knowles,
1975, 1980; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991; Tough, 1971). On the other hand, those writing
in the area of personal narrative are prone to use terms the likes of “re/construction,”

99 ‘6

“interpretation, metaphor,” “narrative” (both as a process and a product of

9’ ‘6 9’ 6‘

construction), “recollection, meaning, self,” and “voice” (Conway, 1998; Dickerson,
1989; Eakin, 1989; Hampl, 1999; Olney, 1980, 1998; Taylor, 1996). Language used
tends to be specialized to the ﬁeld of self-directed learning.

Whereas self-directed learning is concerned with the learner, personal narrative is
concerned with the self (Brunet, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1999; Conway, 1998; Eakin, 1989;
Olney, 1980, 1998). Whereas self-directed learning is concerned with the “process of
change,” personal narrative is concerned with “creating” and “calling into existence”
something that is not there (Dickerson, 1989; Gomick, 2001a, 2001b; Hampl, 1999;
Taylor, 1996). Whereas self-directed learning is concerned with a situation as a
precursor to individual change (Aslanian & Brickell, 1982), personal narrative is
concerned with interpreting one’S way out of a situation (Brunet, 1987, 1995; McAdams,
1993, 1999). Whereas self-directed learning is concerned with experience as a
phenomenon upon which to reﬂect and a component in the learning process (Kolb, 1984,
1988; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991, 1999), personal narrative sees experience as having
no independent existence but rather as being shaped and formed by memory and

language and ﬁgured anew through the process of interpretation (Brunet, 1986, 1987,

1990; Conway, 1998; Gomick, 2001b; Ricoeur, 1991; Taylor, 1996).

177

All in all, I think we can safely say that, through the process of interpretation, a
new identity is formed, a narrative identity of sorts (Eakin, 1999). The revelatory power
inherent in language shapes and forms this identity and calls it into existence (Freeman,
1993). A new text is created from an old text. Meaning is established through an
interpretive process (Brady, 1990; Brunet, 1990; Dickerson, 1989). That which is
without the author becomes changed through language (Freeman, 1993) to that which is
within. The result of this process is a new awareness, an increased sensitivity to things
without and things within, and for all intents and purposes, a different self (Freeman,
1993; McAdams, 1993).

What this means for the classroom is tantamount to preparing for war in a war
college or military academy. The military person must understand the principles of war,
study and learn through case examples and the experiences of others. In addition, this _
individual must experience as closely as possible the “situation” of war through camps
and other means of fabricating and creating “reality” as closely as possible. But nothing
will replace the actual experience of war, and this is nothing under the control of the
military person. Hopefully the study and training have been intense and real enough to
permit intuitive, second-nature sorts of actions when the reality occurs. But only the
reality of war, outside the control of the military person, will reveal the “verisimilitude”
of the study and training.

80, too, is the situation with respect to personal narrative and the classroom. We
can study about the subject. We can create activities (Metzger, 1992; Wuthnow, 1998)
that will enable us to get closer to the subject. We can study cases of others who have
encountered the subject and even engaged in the interpretive process themselves. But

nothing will replace the activity of actually doing the subject, and this is something that

178

cannot be planned and performed in a predetermined block of time. It is a motivation
that can only come from within. When the war battle does occur, hopefully the military
person, because of all his or her study and training, will recall both weapons to use and
appropriate times and examples of how these were used successfully. Although a weak
replica of the actual war zone, the classroom or the orchestrated training ﬁeld is,

nevertheless, all we have to aid the process of preparation.

Autobiography and Self-Directed Learning . . . Expanding the Horizon

Writing is a form of “thinking and discovery and selection and order and
meaning” (Morrison, 1987, p. l l 1). But it also carries with it a sense of “awe and
reverence and mystery and magic” (p. 11 1). It is a sort of literary archaeology in which
the author attempts to reconstruct a memory ediﬁce using some memory and some
imagination as his or her tools (p. 112). In a sense, autobiography is a form of ﬁction, due
to the nature of the imaginative act. But it is also a form of truth in that the author uses
recollection to help reconstruct events, relationships, and feelings that really happened.

Brookﬁeld (1985) claimed that, in self-directed learning, “critical reﬂection on the
contextual and contingent aspects of reality, the exploration of alternative perspectives
and meaning systems, and the alteration of personal and social circumstances are all
present” (p. 15). One of the challenges facing researchers in the area of self-directed
- learning is how to take such learning to a new level. Merriam (2001) suggested that one
way to do this might be to focus more on the quality of the leamer’s experience. What
researchers in the area of narrative psychology (Brunet, 1987, 1995, 1999; Freeman,
1993, 2000; McAdams, 1993, 1996) and writers in the ﬁeld of autobiographical theory
(Conway, 1998; Dickerson, 1989; Eakin, 1999; Gomick, 2001b; Kazin, 1979; Lejeune,

1989; Sprinker, 1981) have demonstrated is the fact that meaning and signiﬁcance

179

emerge through the creation of narrative, the experience of writing about signiﬁcant
experiences from the past. This experience may be the point in time and space where
learning actually occurs, the point where re-creation takes place.

The questions we ask, the transformation we incur, are to a certain degree
bounded and limited by the answers we are prepared to give and the language we have at
our command. The transformation a person experiences or what one learns is limited by
the language he or she has with which to express these results. Words are deﬁned in
terms of other words. Every idea is placed in juxtaposition to another idea. Truly, there is
nothing new under the sun. Yet, each of these authors demonstrated that, truly,
experience does precede language, and that the reforming of our worldviews consists of
experiencing before we can describe, and often describing long before we explain, if we
ever can explain.

Motivation, independence, and autonomy lead to the creation of autobiography.
Redirection and motivation for new and different action is the result. Robinson (1998)
described the importance of action in the life of Bonhoeffer:

Theology may proceed in the manner of a philosophical treatise or a piece of

textual criticism, but it always begins by assuming major terms. And all of them,

being imbedded in Scripture and tradition, behave altogether differently from
discursive language. To compound the problem, Christian thinkers since Jesus
have valued paradox as if it were resolution. So theology is never ﬁnally anything
but theology, words about God, proceeding from the assumptions that God exists
and that we know about him in a way that allows us to speak about him.
Bonhoeffer calls these truths of the church “a word of recognition among
friends.” He invokes this language of recognition and identiﬁcation in attempting
to make the church real and aware of itself, with all that implied when he wrote.
For him word is act. And, for him, it was.(p. 117)
For each of these authors, there was a sense that word was act for them, as well.

Freeman (1993) said that one of the roles narrative plays is to change the world

into word in order to act upon it. Hampl discovered early on that life is neither active nor

180

passive, but rather contemplative, a term brimming with signiﬁcance and meaning as it
relates to action and moving forward. In fact, in the closing scene in Virgin Time: In
Search of the Contemplative Life, Hampl put down her paint brush, disengaged herself
from an attempt to paint a scene along the ocean shoreline, and climbed back up the cliff
She had descended, in order to join her friend Edwina, who was still waiting at the top.
This was symbolic for it represented Hampl’s acting on the world she had recently
converted to word.

Wuthnow (1998) and Metzger (1992) might provide the link or connection
between self-directed learning and autobiography. Both of these authors called their
respective readers to take action in their quests for authenticity. Metzger did this by
giving her readers a vast array of self-directed activities that she invited them to attempt
in an effort to bring out what was hidden deep within themselves. She claimed that
“words not only describe reality and communicate ideas and feelings but also bring into
being the hidden, invisible, or obscure. . . . Words, therefore, are the primary route
toward knowing both the particular worlds we inhabit and our unique and individual
selves” (p. 3).

Wuthnow (1998), by comparison, spent a great deal of time talking about and
comparing what he called a “dwelling” spirituality and a “seeking” spirituality. He
maintained that the secret, if there is one, lies in the practice of spirituality. His
contention was that a dwelling-oriented Spirituality is nigh on impossible to maintain
because of the complex social realities that have come to describe contemporary
American society. A seeking spirituality, although better suited to the complexities of
American society, tends to result in a transient sort of spiritual existence, one whose

predominant description is that it lacks Signiﬁcant depth.

181

The solution for Wuthnow was to locate spirituality in what he called a “practice-

oriented spirituality”:

A practice-oriented spirituality has been part of all religious traditions. Drawing
inspiration from sacred texts and from the lives of saints and other religious
leaders, clergy have encouraged the faithful not only to attend public worship
services but also to devote time to prayer, meditation, study of sacred texts,
inspirational reading, and service. (p. 169)

Each of these six authors had a claim on the stories they told, and in turn the

stories they told had a claim on them. The authors evidenced such self-directed learning

traits as independence and autonomy. But more than that, they had a drive and a desire to

understand, to make sense of things, and to put their respective stories together. In each

case, experience informed thinking, and thinking in turn informed experience. The very

act of reﬂecting, reconstructing, and creating order from what seemed to be chaos is an

example of what Robinson (1998) meant when she said, “Action is revelation” (p. 111).

In a certain sense, all six authors reached a point in their lives when it was

necessary to take the “clay” of living into their own hands, and mold and shape their

inner lives for themselves. In his autobiography, Father and Son, Gosse (1958) said it so

well:

The reader who has done me the favour to follow this record of the clash of two
temperaments will not fail to perceive the crowning importance of the letter from
which I have just made a long quotation. It sums up, with the closest logic, the
whole history of the situation, and I may leave it to form the epigraph of this little
book.

All that I need further say is to point out that when such deﬁance is
offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and honest young man with the normal
impulses of his twenty-one years, there are but two alternatives. Either he must
cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly conﬁrmed, and
the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized.

No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce would have
been acceptable. It was a case of “Everything or Nothing”; and thus desperately
challenged, the young man’s conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his
“dedication,” and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he
took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself. (p. 31 l)

182

Although none of the six authors struggled with freedom from an earthly father
per se, it is evident that each struggled to be free form the authority of “life as it always
has been.” In a certain sense, each author threw off the yoke of his or her dedication to
the way things always had been. Like Gosse, they did this as respectfully as they could,
“without parade or remonstrance,” in order to take the human being’s privilege of

fashioning an inner life for themselves.

183

APPENDIX

184

APPENDIX

Hampl, P. (1992). Virgin time: In search of the contemplative life. New York:
Ballantine Books.

Patricia Hampl begins her quest not to ﬁnd something, but to shake off the indelible
brand of a Catholic upbringing. Yet even as an adult removed from the dogma of her
early Catholic training, She feels the pull of contemplative prayer. In her search, She
travels to the “old world” of Catholicism, to the golden haze of St. Francis’s Assisi and to
the surging crowds of Lourdes with their candles and incurable illnesses. Her pilgrimage
is peopled with other wanderers—crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan
friars and nuns, and the seekers that ﬁll every charter ﬂight. Inevitably, she ﬁnds the “old
world” right at home, in the very past she had tried to escape. But what she was looking
for confronts her, ﬁnally, on a retreat at a monastery near the Lost Coast of northern
California in the still, virgin moments of silent prayer.

Heilman, S. (1984). The gate behind the wall: A pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society.

When Samuel Heilman took a sabbatical from teaching sociology to spend time in
Jerusalem, he did not know that it would become a personal pilgrimage. “Not until I had
been to Jerusalem and Observed and joined in the act of lernen the Talmud would I be
able to discover its centrality to my own Jewish existence,” Heilman writes. “What had
begun by engaging the social scientist in me would end by awakening the Jew.”

As he met with Talmudic scholars, with mystics and preachers, and with the ordinary
people of Jerusalem, Heilman sensed the opening of the gate in his wall of resistance to
the past. While studying the holy books he had previously put aside in the name of
science, he breached the boundaries of time and place and discovered a spirit that linked
his modern world with his ancient heritage.

Jamison, K. (1995). An unquiet mind: A memoir of moods and madness. New York:
Vintage Books.

Kay Redﬁeld Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School
Of Medicine. She is the author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the
Artistic Temperament, and co-author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive
illness, chosen in 1990 as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the
Association of American Publishers. The recipient of numerous national and international
scientiﬁc awards, Dr. Jamison was a member of the ﬁrst National Advisory Council for
Human Genome Research, as well as the clinical director for the Dana Consortium on the
Genetic Basis of Manic-Depressive Illness. She lives in Washington, DC, with her
husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a physician and scientist at the National Institute of Health.

Price, R. (1994). A whole new life: An illness and a healing. New York: Atheneum.

“This book is a book about a mid-life collision with cancer and paralysis, a collision I’ve
survived for ten years and counting. It means to be an accurate and readable account of a

185

frightening painﬁll time that ended; but while I know that any account of human realities
will travel best in the form of a story, a compelling story is not my ﬁrst aim. That aim is
to give, in the midst of an honest narrative, a true record of the visible and invisible ways
in which one fairly normal creature entered a trial, not of his choosing, and emerged after
a long four years on a new life—a life that’s almost wholly changed from the old. The
record is offered ﬁrst to others in physical or psychic trials of their own, to their families
and other helpers and then to the curious reader who waits for his or her own devastation.

Snyder, D. (1997). The cliff walk: A memoir of a job lost and a life found. New York:
Little, Brown.

Don Snyder was a professor of English, married, with three children and another on the
way, when he got his pink slip. He was sure that it would be only a short stretch before he
found another teaching job and was reinstated in the bright life he had come to expect—
after all, he had published several books and won praise for his teaching over the years.
But the wait stretched on, unbelievably, past a year, until his money and his prospects
were gone. Jobs once his for the asking were suddenly far out of reach.

The Cliﬂ' Walk chronicles Don Snyder’s journey from privilege to desperation to a new
sense of hope. With each dispiriting change in his life—selling the family’s house,
standing in line for food stamps, scrawling new budgets each night inside the covers of
his kids’ bedtime books—he came to see his previous assumptions about work and
money and America as na‘r’ve dreams. A change ﬁnally came from an unlikely place: He
found a job as an unskilled laborer on a construction site, working outside through a
punishing Maine winter. As he slowly learned new skills and let go of old illusions, he
found grace and dignity in a kind of work he had run from all his life.

Tompkins, J. (1996). A life in school: What the teacher learned. Cambridge: Perseus
Books.

This book tells the story of how I came to view school in a radically different way. I did
not set out to change my views; experience changed them for me. Some alterations in the
way I taught led to greater self-consciousness about what I was doing in the classroom.
This prompted me to look back into my own past as a student, to relive the school days of
my childhood. As I experimented more boldly in my teaching, and delved further into the
past, my inner life began to be transformed. Remembering the past was not, as I had
originally thought, just an attempt to see how I had been molded as a teacher by the
teachers who had molded me; it was an exploratory mission into the depths of my
formation as a person, and it put me in touch for the ﬁrst time with the founding
experiences of my life. It helped me to discover what kind of person I had become as a
result of those early school experiences, and even more, who I had been before they
worked their will on me.

186

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