<p><strong>A Vocation Is Hard Work</strong><p/>

When I'm asked what I do and I answer by saying that I'm writing a PhD in English literature, the next question is usually about what I will do afterwards, with that qualification that allows me to put 'Dr' in front of my name? The implication is that if someone is still in education as they enter their 30s, the rewards must be worth it. Acutely aware that hearing someone talk about their PhD is not the most riveting of subjects, I sometimes say I want to lecture and make it sound like the PhD is just a kind of practical training for that job. Sometimes I actually pretend not to know what I want to do afterwards, and usually people respond positively by admiring my desire to retain the purity of learning for the sake of learning.</p> 
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But I am lying. Neither of these answers is true. But neither is entirely false, either. In truth, the reality is some messy amalgamation of both, hard to pin down with any clarity. Because it is true that I would like to gain a lectureship at a university when I finish my PhD, but the very nature of the work means that no-one would undertake it for purely practical reasons. A PhD is (usually) three years researching a question you have set for yourself, with the possibility that the question will morph endlessly and lead you to play catch-up for those three years, or even that you may never satisfactorily actually answer it. This would be a lot less daunting if you didn't have to turn in a document of some 100,000 words after those three years, and then defend what you've written verbally, in person, to a panel of experts. When those who ask me about the PhD say “You must really like reading books!” they are asking a much more existential question than they realise.</p> 

But actually there is no reason to think that my two answers are mutually exclusive. In fact I like reading books so much that I want to carry on doing it after the PhD. It seems like common sense to say that loving something and wanting to do it for an extended period of time (usually a career) go together. By contrast it seems rather perverse, not to say cruel, to suggest that someone should do something they love for three or four years and then abruptly give it up and settle for a career they don't care for. Love of something suggests an abiding connection, not a flash in the pan which ends when you get your cap and gown. It seems equally odd to suggest that someone who does something for practical reasons is by definition excluded from also loving what they do.</p>

We're dealing here with the concept of a vocation, which can be applied to both of my answers. The OED defines it, partly, as “the fact of being so called or directed towards a special work in life” and notes “especially” its “spiritual” or “religious” nature. Its etymological root is the Latin vocāre which means to call or summon. The word's meaning has various strands in different religious contexts and denominations, but some of them include: the idea that each individual has a special talent which with the proper application can contribute positively to the wider community; that this special talent can be developed and if not perfected at least bettered; that this development includes (and espouses the value of) work, understood not just as something you do but the result of toil, a thing undertaken willingly despite the possibility of suffering because through that commitment and endurance it becomes somehow noble and a way for humans to approach God.</p> 

Although it is defined as a summons, then, having a vocation also implies the need to apply oneself to hard work, often to a specific goal (benefiting the community). A vocation is both being called or summoned to a course of action and choosing to devote oneself to it. In this sense there is a profound connection between vocation and struggle; despite being summoned, a vocation is not undertaken easily. Precisely because it is a vocation it must be worked at and worked at, slowly and enduringly. And it asks that the individual take responsibility for their action. </p>

I cannot conceive of doing what I do without some sense of it as a vocation. At times, though, it veers to close to fate. I say, If you'd looked at me when I was six and had to guess what that six year-old would grow up to be, you would most likely have said English literature academic. Yet I know that although I did indeed discover a love for literature at an early age, much of my other circumstances pointed toward a different path. While I felt a connection with literature that could be construed in some way as a call, insofar as I responded to it and what the study of it involved, I also spent years deliberating over whether to enter postgraduate education. I chose to do this. And I've also worked hard at it, balancing a Masters with a full-time job and working six days a week on the PhD. These last experiences, although chosen, would not have been possible for me if I didn't love doing it as much as I do.  </p>

Thinking about vocation leads you to think in these terms of obstacles and tests and it encourages a religious outlook, although I think for me the religious outlook came first and I later applied it to my work. My parents are church-goers, and took me with them every Sunday until I was ten or so, when I decided not to go any more. Nevertheless the influence of those early years runs deep. Among other things, it offered a structure for seeing the world which because it was the first one has had the most impact. I associate particular ideas I hold with these early visits: a sense that meaning is always just out of reach yet we should not stop striving for it, for instance, or the feeling that commitment and endurance are important-yet-difficult qualities to possess which need nurturing in order to fully develop. These are things I imbibed somehow at a young age, singing along to hymns I didn't understand the words of and following rituals whose significance I barely registered. But these rituals, with their carefully specified movements and the ceremonial way they linked my own repetitions of language and action to the time of the world, acted as sediments to my character, layering within me ways of thought and ways of seeing that are now irreducibly part of who I am. </p>

What I most associate with my young exposure to religion is a particular sense of time. It's one that other people might associate with other things, a political cause for instance, but I associate it first and foremost with religion, and I can best describe it as an understanding that is often unconscious, influencing unseen my reaction to events and requirements. In a very basic way, it is the acceptance that things happen slowly and often imperceptibly, and that one can only really notice or chart change by paying careful and sustained attention to it. Noticing the world is slow. To my mind, it is no accident that some of the earliest scholars were monks, whose lives carved out time by cutting away any superfluities, which allowed them to focus on their vocation. </p>

My religious upbringing has certainly helped me. It has given me a context in which to place my choice, a choice which at times is cause for doubt. It provides comfort in this way. It helps to imagine early scholars for whom acedia, that ancient kind of tiredness, was the biggest enemy, not because their work was dull but because it required such attention to detail that it was exhausting. David Foster Wallace, one of the writers I'm looking at in my PhD, wrote of the experience of Benedictine monks who suffered this affliction. In his novel The Pale King, he suggests in much the same spirit as those religious interpretations of the word “vocation” that this is not an experience to avoid, but rather the sign of something worth doing. </p>

One word of caution, though: I find thinking in these shapes very attractive, and it is easy to get caught up in what can be quite a romantic view of things. Remembering that to have a vocation involves both responding to the world and choosing a particular way of responding, that it includes the very un-romantic daily trudge and training oneself in the practicalities of repetition, is a good way of avoiding such sentimentality. </p>
 
