3
AN ASIDE. From the time I became a Tar, I think I knew, without understanding it, that from a Tar’s point of view the real reason for being a Tar was not to perform the services to the school that the Tars were supposed to perform, not to provide the model of comportment and achievement that the Tars were supposed to provide, not to learn the ways of seafaring men, but to gain a position in a hierarchy, a position above one’s fellows. I say that I knew this from the start because I can recall so vividly the emotions I felt when I thought that I would lose the rank of Commodore, and because I can recall with equal vividness the petty satisfaction I took in producing my notebook, in having this small advantage over the others, an advantage with a value within the structure of the Tars far beyond its worth in society at large.
(I don’t mean to belittle the value of carrying a notebook. Society is a vast edifice with many nooks and crannies where notebooks are necessities. The gas-meter reader couldn’t do his job without his notebook; Albertine couldn’t run the hotel without hers. I only mean that, within most social structures, carrying a notebook does not give one rights and privileges over one’s fellows. One does not expect, for example, when waiting in a line for a movie, that if one flourishes one’s pocket notebook, the others in line will fall away and call out, “Step aside, please. Here’s a guy with a notebook. Let him go to the head of the line.”)
I was eager to use the hierarchy of the Tars to elevate myself above my fellows. I wanted to be declared and certified superior to anyone Mr. Summers could round up who was willing to be certified inferior to me. I was certainly not alone in this desire for rank; if it hadn’t been widespread, there could have been no Young Tars. The first evidence of how well Mr. Summers understood this desire came when he demoted all the girls—in effect—by kicking them out of the Tars and into the newly created Tars Auxiliary. All of us Tars, to our shame, stood taller at once.
One more aside, a related one. Although I attained the rank of Commodore through a fluke, today (the day of my composing this sentence, a still, hot one in my forty-first August, one of those when the bay is oleaginous and the sun buttery), I see that there was a sense in which I earned the rank of Commodore, earned at least the right to keep it: I earned it by enduring the expectation of losing it, and it may be that no other experience so makes us deserve to feel that a thing is ours as enduring the fear that it will be taken from us.
In Topical Guide 211, Mark Dorset considers Digression from this episode.
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🎧 211: An aside.