Yielding to admonishment

AT around midnight, tonight, I will lay down my pen – a day or so before this column appears in print – and try to regain some of the energy and strength that has kept me going for decades.

It is probably the last column I will write for The Herald, at least for the foreseeable future.

My doctors have warned that if I did not slow down, immediately, my health may collapse even further.

A combination of physical and emotional exhaustion, resulting from prolonged stress and frustration, has had detrimental effects on my immune system. I am burnt out.

And so, for the past couple of months or so I have been wearing a cloak of lead while battling an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection in my chest.

My doctors’ warning is, of course, an admonishment less dramatic than what Russian writer Dmitry Grigorovich handed to Anton Chekov in 1886, when he suggested that he (Chekov) stopped writing immediately and saved himself for writing during “happy hours of inspiration”.

I am sure that “happy hours of inspiration” will return.

In truth I write, as most people do, out of restlessness, terror, fear, uncertainty, anger, rage and a genuine sense of not knowing. But I write anyway. So, when Chekov replied to Grigorovich he wrote: “I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires – mechanically, half-consciously, caring neither about the reader or myself.”

Much of this is true of course, especially the part about having to cut down on work to save myself.

As for the rest, I care too much about our failings as a society, the rampant poverty, inequality and general hopelessness of those people who consume nothing they produce, and produce nothing they consume.

These are the people who live in parallel economies, outside the palisade fencing, and who rely on a disintegrating state.

This is much more than what you and I – the reader and the writer – have.

There is some truth, then, to what Chekov told Grigorovich, when I write, I care “neither about the reader or myself”.

The reader may recall that when I set out to write this column, the objective was to start “demystifying” economics, and making it easier to understand how “economics” hangs together with “society” and how desperately impossible it is to separate the two.

I hope, dear reader, that I have managed to do that with some success.

It is difficult, at the best of times, to write about highly complex matters in under 800 words, especially when you can sum each column up in three words, which I shall not repeat here.

I wrote my first column almost 30 years ago, then took a long hiatus in academia and in a policy environment.

There can be no better place to be, right now, than in an institution of higher learning.

I have known that since the first time I stood before a class and gave a lecture more than 10 years ago.

We face an unprecedented crisis in higher education in South Africa, but I can say, with some confidence, that I would not want to be anywhere else.

Let me turn, briefly, again to Chekov who once wrote: “Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

Before I end off, then, let me tell you the story, briefly, of a former student, at Elon University, in my political economy class. His name was Nick. At the end of my last lecture of the term, Nick raised his hand.

I remember this like it was yesterday.

Nick stood up and said: “Professor, you have told us all these theories and given us all these examples.

“Are you ever going to tell us what you, yourself, actually think?”

“What I think is not what matters in class, Nick. My job is only to make sure you think.” Nick rolled his eyes. The girl next to him gave a facepalm.

Others sighed, in a friendly way, and off they went to enjoy summer.

Before he left the classroom, I called Nick aside and told him this: “If you want my advice, Nick: treat all humans like ends in themselves, and never as means to an end.”

Nick shook my hand, thanked me and walked away.

I remember thinking that I hoped he did not join the military after university.

The US had entered one of the worst crises in its history and young people with university education often found that the only place where they could find a job was in the military.

If, dear reader, you want to know what I really think, it would be what I told Nick: treat all humans like ends in themselves, and never as means to an end.

‘ If you want to know what I really think, it would be what I told Nick: treat all humans like ends in themselves, and never as means to an end