The Man in the Arena

It is a stupid phrase. It has that official sound, like a sentence meant to be printed in a neat hand and hung in some warm office where the windows are clean. And yet it gets into my head and sits there, heavy, like a pebble in the mouth. I try to laugh at it, to dismiss it. What is Roosevelt to me? What is his arena to my life? And still it returns at the most inconvenient moments, when the room smells of stale paper and my hands are idle and my thoughts begin their usual work.

I have noticed (it is ridiculous that I notice such things, as though I were some observer of my own life) that the day is often decided in the first ten minutes. If I stand up at once, if I do not lie there bargaining, then perhaps the day will not be entirely squandered. But if I lie there, if I allow myself even a small softness, it is finished. I will not do anything serious. I will move about, yes. Oh, I can be very busy, almost exemplary. But only with tasks that do not touch the sore place. I will arrange and tidy, answer something trivial with an air of importance, wash a cup with the gravity of a surgeon. I will not, under any circumstances, put my finger on the wound.

And all this happens so quietly that it looks like ordinary living. That is the worst of it. If I were dramatic, if I were clearly ruined, I might at least have the dignity of obviousness. But no, I function. I speak. I even smile. Only inside there is this constant grinding shame, the kind that does not flare up and pass, but sits there like a dull toothache and makes everything taste faintly of metal.

I have failed too often to be surprised by it. Failure is not a catastrophe. It is an atmosphere. It is the air I breathe when I try to do anything that matters to me. The strange thing is that I can still remember the first few times, when I believed failure was an exception. I believed that if I simply persisted, if I applied myself properly, there would come a moment when everything would begin to work, like a locked mechanism suddenly yielding. I believed in that moment the way children believe in a secret door.

There is no secret door. There is only the same door, and it is always the same weight. Each time you push it you feel, humiliatingly, your own weakness. You feel it in the wrists, in the stomach, in the breath. You feel it in the ridiculous thought that rises at once: maybe today I will be different. As if difference were a coat you could put on.

And then I begin, because sometimes I do begin, I must give myself that. At once there comes the inevitable sensation, almost physical, that I am not equal to what I have undertaken. I see too clearly the distance between what I imagined and what is in front of me. It is not even distance, it is something nastier. I see my own inadequacy standing there calmly, like a person waiting.

At that point the mind, with its infernal cleverness, offers relief. Not obvious relief, nothing so vulgar as saying stop. It offers something soft and reasonable, wrapped in care. It says: not now. It says: you need to prepare more. It says: you are tired. It says: do it tomorrow when you are sharper, when you are cleaner, when you feel a little more like the person you think you ought to be.

I have listened to that voice so many times that it has become almost indistinguishable from my own. Perhaps it is my own. That is what frightens me. Because if it is mine, then what am I? A man who manufactures excuses with the same ease other men manufacture chairs? A man who can justify anything to himself, provided it keeps him from shame?

And then, at some point, sometimes an hour later, sometimes immediately, sometimes only when the day has already been squandered beyond repair, the phrase returns: the man in the arena. It returns not like inspiration but like a slap. It does not soothe me. It makes me nauseous. I feel it in the chest, that little tightening, that offended refusal. Who is Roosevelt to speak to me? Who is anyone? What does it matter? There is no credit. There is no tribunal handing out justice for effort. There is only the indifferent day, the indifferent world, and the indifferent fact that you will die whether you tried or not.

And still something in me cannot accept the alternative. Something in me cannot bear the idea of remaining forever in this state: thinking about doing, preparing to live, rehearsing, judging, postponing. It is like living beside your own life, as though it belonged to someone else. It is like watching yourself from a corner with crossed arms and pretending this coldness is intelligence.

So I go in.

I do not go in bravely. I do not go in cleanly. I go in as one goes into a room where one expects to be humiliated. I go in with that unpleasant mixture of stubbornness and disgust, as if forcing myself. Perhaps I am forcing myself. Perhaps the whole of my persistence is nothing but coercion, self-coercion, the only kind available.

I sit down again. I open the thing again. I begin again. At once there is that internal sneer, that watchful contempt: look at you. It is astonishing how quickly I can despise myself. It takes no effort at all. It is my most natural talent.

But if I remain, if I do not run, something strange sometimes happens. Not often, not reliably, but enough to keep me returning like a fool. The work becomes less symbolic. It stops being a verdict on my entire existence. It becomes work. Sentence after sentence. Step after step. The grand horror shrinks to an inconvenience, and I find myself irritated rather than terrified, which is already an improvement. I begin to see that my fear is not profound. It is repetitive. It is boring. It is the same old thing wearing a new hat.

The dirt is not poetic. It is not the noble “dust and sweat and blood” people like to quote. It is smaller, more humiliating: the stupid mistakes, the pointless lapses, the moments of laziness, the half-hearted effort, the sudden urge to sabotage everything so I can later say, with a miserable little pride, it was not real anyway. I know that trick. I have used it. I have watched myself use it and felt, at the same moment, both relief and disgust, as though I were drinking something that sickens me but still warms the throat.

But even that cannot last. The distance becomes unbearable. The cleverness becomes rancid. The days begin to pile up behind me like unpaid bills. I start to feel, not sadness, not despair in any tidy sense, but a particular dread: the dread of being untouched by my own life.

And then again, tomorrow or the next day or after another wasted week, I return.

I return without illusions. I return without believing anyone is watching. I return without believing in credit. I return because I cannot endure the other thing. I return because the only moments when I feel even faintly real are the moments when I have dirt on me, when something has resisted me and I have pressed back, when something has bruised me and I have not immediately fled.

I dislike this about myself, this necessity. I would rather be clean. I would rather be safe. I would rather be that person who does not have to wrestle with his own mind like this, who does not have to drag himself by the collar into his own life.

But I am not that person.