Of my mother’s many siblings, there’s one I’m close with. When I was at high school, he gave me a summer job at his business, which was installing air conditioners in Vienna. I carried pipes and tools, drilled holes and patched walls. At the end of each day, I was more exhausted than I had ever been before, and the experience discouraged me from seeking employment involving honest, physical labor for the rest of my life.
My uncle liked to chat with whoever else was at the jobsite, whether they were other workers, the people who had hired him, or those living and working there. He read a lot and loved to talk about books. When he made literary references to office workers in their smart suits, I could see them tensing up. They didn’t expect quotes from 19th century novels from the air conditioner guy and it made them uncomfortable.
My uncle introduced me to many writers I love to this day. He gave me my first book by Paul Auster (Mr Vertigo) and told me to read David Foster Wallace and Richard Ford. He was able to correctly guess which books would speak to me.
What I didn’t know then but have learned since is that he had a darker side. Like my mother, he left home at an early age, but while she went to university, he took a series of menial jobs and started to hang out with the wrong people. He drank and used drugs. At some point, he peed on a police car while drunk. It’s not clear if he was aware that there were two officers in the car while he did his business, but he became aware immediately afterwards because they came out and beat him up. Not long after that, he was arrested during a break-in and spent time in prison.
By the summer I worked for him, that part of his life was long behind him. He was settled, a small business owner, married with three kids. He still drank, but it was under control.
Even though he read a lot, he was self-conscious about never having finished high school. This awareness must’ve lurked in the back of his mind each time he was talking to his clients in suits or to a bank manager about getting a loan. There was nothing that he could’ve been taught at school that would’ve helped him in his business, but by not having that diploma, he felt inferior to those who had it.
I believe that the biggest value of having an education is to know that there’s nothing special about it. The more expensive and prestigious the school, the better you understand this. This protection from being intimidated is more important than the social connections you make or what they teach you. Being at an ivy league school, you realize that those who go there aren’t all that smart, or insightful, or polished. There are some social codes and ways of speaking that fancy school graduates share, but they’re not that obvious and in any case easily learned. It’s also easier to get certain kinds of job, but those graduates aren’t better or worse than anyone else, except that they have a huge advantage: They know that there’s nothing to be intimidated by when talking to someone educated at Ox- or Stanford. Those who didn’t go through one of those schools, and even more so those like my uncle who didn’t graduate from high school, don’t know this at the same visceral level.
Nehaveigur 