INSIGHTS

CHARLES KURALT is interviewing a man on a film being shown on my flight to Chicago. I don’t have a headset, so I don’t know the man’s name. He is wearing a blue work shirt and is sporting a Sixties ponytail. What he represents is as nearly perfect an antithesis as I can imagine for those who measure their lives by that mind-numbing phrase, “What’s the bottom line?”

The man is blowing soap bubbles, just like the ones you blew as a kid. He is blowing bubbles in beautiful and intricate configurations. He blows bubbles within bubbles and then a succession of bubbles that rotate first clock-wise, then counterclockwise. Then he blows smoke in a bubble and punctures it, and we watch it deflate just as a balloon does. The people who are watching are smiling-even laughing involuntarily. Will this man who blows bubbles so well find an agent who will develop a non-book, Blowing Bubbles to Get in Touch With Your Innermost Feelings? Will it be sold at every checkout stand in America? Perhaps. But this bubble-blower has the look of someone who is less interested in royalties than in the satisfaction of doing something for its own sake.

The trap we allow to be set for ourselves is set so slyly that when it springs, we are caught totally unaware. The trap is the tenet that says that what we’re doing is never as valuable as what we’re going to do. The idea of doing something well for its own sake-for the sake of the pleasure it brings us-has about the same chance of survival as moths hitting the wind-shield of a speeding 18-wheeler.

In high school, it’s not the courses; it’s the grades. It’s not what you’ve learned or how well you’ve learned it; it’s the grades. Grades serve to certify you as eligible for the College of Your Choice. Ah, then it’s college where the learning takes place for its own sake. Hold on; not quite. College exists to certify you for graduate school or a career. Then that’s when you start doing things for their own sake. Well, not exactly.

Is tennis without a net the answer? Or macramé? Moving in with Leo Buscaglia? The real question is: Why are there so few people who do things for their own sake, and why do we admire them so much?

People who do things for their own sake are our great resisters. What they resist most is the allure of the unnecessary. They have seen the unnecessary drive out or deaden the will to pursue those few things that give a life its elements of worth. These resisters ready themselves for the question at the end: “Now what did that all mean?”

In 1968, during the first single-hand sailing race around the world, Bernard Moitessier achieved a special place in the hearts of those who do something well for its own sake. After the sailboats rounded Cape Horn, the last leg began with Moitessier in the lead. But instead of going for victory, he turned 180 degrees and circled the world again. Had he decided, alone on the vastness of the sea, that it was sailing he loved and not the race? His act of defiance was in no way connected to the currently fashionable stories of dropping out-the ones in which people succumb to pop psychology and head for Aspen. Moitessier’s love of what he did didn’t require any third-party endorsements from a race committee. After that voyage, he wrote: “Joshua [his boat] will always carve her wake for the pleasure of giving life to sheaves of spray, for the simple joy of sailing the sea under the sun and the stars.”

Unfortunately, doing things well and doing them for their own sake aren’t necessarily connected. I once knew the head of programming for one of the major television networks. He was brilliant, extremely competitive and deeply cynical. His theories of programming and structuring a schedule were based on what he termed the L.O.P., which stood for the Least Objectionable Program. It was that kind of program, he believed, that was most successful and around which he built a winning schedule year after year. It was not a schedule that had much room for programs such as Masterpiece Theatre, Hill Street Blues or public affairs broadcasts. The reason public affairs couldn’t attract an audience, he said, was that the audience knew that when a person contracted venereal disease on Marcus Welby, M.D., the victim would be cured by the end of the program; but when a person caught VD on a documentary, the audience thought they’d catch it.

I was around this man long enough to understand that what he did well didn’t seem to bring him any pleasure. And he certainly didn’t do what he did for its own sake. What he came to believe about us as an audience made him lose faith in his own instincts for what was truly good programming. His example has always stuck in my mind.

The point is not that we should buy some overalls, work shirts and a pair of boots and head for the woods. I’m only suggesting that doing something well for its own sake is something we should realistically define for ourselves. It may be risky, but it’s not as risky as checking out only to realize that you danced as hard as you could but to someone else’s tune.