Magazine
Reading Between the Cells
From the Matrix to the wine-dark sea
By Gil Y. Roth
Summertime's just getting started, accompanied by a host of traditions: hanging out at the local park or beach (you're excused if your local temps have been crunched by La Niña), driving out on mini-vacations (you're excused if fuel prices have demolished your travel budget), grilling in the backyard (you're excused if food costs have blown through the roof), and of course reading the Contract Pharma Salary Survey (no excuse to miss that one; you may as well go download this year's edition and start trying to figure out why everyone makes more than you do).
Compiling the results of our annual Salary Survey always puts me in a wistful mood. Well, maybe "wistful" is a bit odd of a term, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. Looking over the columns of cells and formulas in my Excel worksheets always leaves me with two thoughts:
- "Isn't it amazing how we can distill people's careers, educations, geographies and lives into neat sets of numbers and metrics?" and
- "I gotta find a job that pays better."
For the purposes of this column, it's probably best that I focus on the former item, and its Matrix-like dynamic between how much of us is representable in a spreadsheet and how much isn't.
All the filters I apply to the responses, all the ways I reorder the information, all the patterns that emerge: they sketch out the world in which we work and give us some idea of how we got where we are. Looking at these numbers from above, they just about make sense of my morning commute.
Which isn't to say that our lives are haphazard, or guided by seemingly random choices. Sure, accident and luck play into it, but there's a higher element to who we are; there are common traits that make us people, that fill in the sketch described by those Excel formulae. (Sure, one of those traits is our universal need to check out salary surveys or any other document that gives us a clue about how other people are getting by).
Recently, I read an article about the 40th anniversary of the graduate program I attended at St. John's College. Lawrence Berns, my first tutor at the school (we don't call them professors), discussed the process of adapting the "Great Books" syllabus for the four-term Master's course from of the four-year undergrad curriculum:
Michael Ossorgin, tutor, ordained Russian Orthodox priest, Dostoyevsky expert, and musician, was perhaps the most sweetly intelligent man I have ever known. Some days after I had shown him my Literature selections, he called to invite me to lunch. He had developed a better idea for that sequence, but he would never say that.
As soon as we were seated for lunch he turned to me and said, "Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad and the Odyssey."
And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the Literature sequence to extend the time for those books.
As soon as we were seated for lunch he turned to me and said, "Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad and the Odyssey."
And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the Literature sequence to extend the time for those books.
So when you're sitting back with the Salary Survey this summer, and find yourself wondering why you didn't go into Corporate Management, remember that life can be bigger than the numbers.
