In search of self

Al was an undergraduate friend, one of those friends you make accidentally because you live on the same floor in the same dorm.  We weren't best friends, or, really, even close friends; but we enjoyed each other's company more than we enjoyed that of most of our other dormmates.

He was obviously bright, and he had an intense intellectual curiosity -- he was a math major --  but he didn't focus obsessively on his school work.  I rarely saw him studying.  In fact, I rarely saw him absorbed intently in anything.  He was funny, often caustically funny -- but that was the style of humor that our student society inculcated.  He was laid back, he could be kind, he wasn't exactly shy.  But he was -- as one dormmate put it -- socially inert.  He didn't seek out friends, but he had friends.  He didn't date, but that wasn't unusual for nerdy undergraduates in our all-male dormitory society.

He had a Honda 500 motorcycle, which he often let me borrow.  We rode it together once up the Bayshore Freeway, some 35 miles to San Francisco, for some event -- an excursion that seems suicidal now in retrospect.  He wasn't a fearful guy.

Al and another friend and I eventually shared an off-campus apartment for several months, and he visited my hometown up in the Northwest Corner a couple of times during breaks.  So I thought I knew him well.

After graduation, I moved to Seattle for graduate school at the UW, and a couple of years later, Al returned to his home state of Minnesota to attend the University of Minnesota law school.  After his first several months of law school, he sent me a five page letter, a letter that I discovered last night while rooting around in old boxes.

Al wrote that, so far as he knew, he was doing ok in law school.  He was reading and briefing the assigned cases, but wasn't spending much time studying. 

In some ways my life is beginning to resemble that sophomore year spent in [our dorm] (heaven forbid!!) I find it hard to get interested in any worthwhile intellectual pursuits, and I've been spending lot of time just talking with other guys in the hall in somewhat of a similar condition.

He mentioned that he had been egged on by friends to be a bit more socially active, and had attended a party with them.

I ended up with a cute little airline stewardess who, aside from not appreciating Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, was very appealing.

Then he mentioned that, despite not spending much time studying law, he had been reading a lot of books unrelated to law.  He was especially impressed by a book just published by psychologist Virginia Axline that has since become a classic -- Dibs in Search of Self.

This along with the next few books have had quite an impact on my way of looking at my own education and personality development.

The nine other books were all related to personality development in one way or another -- the only one of the nine I've ever read was A. S. Neill's Summerhill.  He told me if I read none other of the books he listed, I should at least read Dibs.

Then Al wrote the sentence that strikes me emotionally today:

I include the book list not only for your reading pleasure; I think that for you to read a few of these books in the realization that I have found special significance in much of what their authors say will give you a much better insight into what kind of a person I am than any letter I could write might give you.

Al finished law school -- despite his lack of enthusiasm -- and became a member of a Minneapolis law firm.  I received a letter from him when he was about 30, which I can't now locate.  In it, he sounded reasonably happy, was married to an African-American woman and was planning to adopt a biracial daughter.  He seemed a little concerned about my reaction to this marriage, which didn't sound like a concern Al would have had, or at least expressed, as a student.  He told me some more about himself, apologized for times he may have been abrupt or insulting when we were students (which was really how we all related to each other in our student days!), and ended up hoping that what he told me about himself would help me to have a better idea of what "your friend" (Al) was like.

We never communicated again.  I looked up his firm in Martindale-Hubbell about 15 years later.  Al had died at the age of 42. 

I have no idea why or how he died.  Early illness?  Motorcycle accident?  Or, what bothers me, suicide?

After reading his letter last night, I downloaded Dibs in Search of Self on my Kindle, and am about 30 percent of the way through.  I may post a review of Dibs later.  (I read it back in the '60s, in response to Al's letter, but I now really recall only the cover of the paperback, not its contents.)  Dibs was a five-year-old boy who his wealthy parents believed to be mentally retarded.  His pre-school teachers at an exclusive private school observed that he never played with other children.  In fact, he never played.  He never talked, aside from an occasional isolated word.  He held himself rigidly.  At most he would skulk around the edge of the class, looking at various toys.  Autism had been ruled out, although some reviewers seem to assume that Dibs was autistic.

Ms. Axline worked with Dibs one-on-one, for an hour per week, applying her theory of "play therapy."  I may describe her approach, which may or may not be dated, in a later review of her book.  The bottom line is that Dibs flourished under her total attention and total acceptance and total optimism.  He was not retarded, although so far in my reading the cause for his extreme disability has not been indicated.  I don't think Axline was even particularly interested in etiology.  Almost from her first session with him, he displayed a vocabulary far beyond average for his age.  He ultimately tested with an incredible IQ of 168.

Axline last heard of Dibs when he was 15, when someone showed a letter he had written for a school publication.  Dibs would always be a unique individual -- that was a basic part of Axline's philosophy -- but a happy and self-confident individual and a person with much to share.

I keep thinking how Al emphasized in his letter the impact that Dibs had made on him, and how he wanted me to read the book, to appreciate the impact it had on him, and -- especially -- as a result to understand him better. I keep worrying, what was it that Al saw in the scared little boy in Dibs that reminded him of himself? How did reading the book help him to understand himself, or offer him guidance on how to live his life? And did it ultimately help? Or fail?

Was he still searching for self at 42? When he died?

When I was an undergraduate, and on into my 20s, I -- like most of us, probably -- was so concerned with my own development, academically, emotionally, personally, that I "understood" my friends only insofar as I saw myself reflected in them.   I wish that I hadn't just brushed off Al's letter as indicating some new intellectual area that had caught his eye.  I wish that I had sensed that there was some pain he was fighting his way through beneath his joking, sarcastic façade.  I wish I could have helped if, in no other way, by just letting him know that I was interested in his feelings and willing to listen to him.

But then I would have been a different person.