(1) We need to pay more attention to the undercurrents that pull and tug at us, that push us to become the kind of person we are. What are the undercurrents in your life? What kind of story are you trying to tell as a student of law?

We engage everyday in conversation and activities that provide clues to the stories we are living. And yet, we have trouble seeing the stories that we internalize and follow with allegiance. In taking on the various roles that we accept (or have pushed on us) we filter what we see and hear in a way that flattens our perception and impoverishes our story. Performing a role, defining ourselves by the parameters of a role, living as if we are a role, can devalue as well as enrich our stories. A role can become a socially-scripted story incongruent with the ideals we associate with being a lawyer. Being a person, having a life to live, with hopes, fears, and dreams is more than any role or set of roles can prescribe. Roles may describe what we do but it is stories that embody our lives. We need stories because life fully lived does not lend itself to description and definition, or to abstract theories.

And we need to learn how this story of becoming a lawyer is related to other stories, stories we were told as children, the stories we are trying to live out in our families, churches and communities.

What kind of story does your initiation into law made possible? What kind of story have you made of your legal education?

(i) Try to remember when you first thought of coming to law school. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? Did someone encourage or oppose your coming to law school? Did your decision to enter law school pose a threat to someone that you care about? How has being in law school affected your relationship with your family and friends?

(ii) If you are to see how virtue and ethics works then you will need to know something about the story you have brought with you to law school and how that story is changed by being in law school and how your story as a lawyer is taking shape.

As a student of ethics you already know something about the person you are and the ethics you already have. When you know who you are and how your ethics work then you can see how your ethics stacks up against the promise implied in the ideals that you seek to embody in your life. When we attend to ethics we become attentive to stories in which the promises we have made to ourselves have been broken, stories in which they are fulfilled.

In law school you embark upon an educational endeavor that turns out to be more than be called professional training. In short, legal education and professional life involve one's self in the most profound ways. It is difficult, if not impossible, to go through law school and to become a professional without confronting questions about the choice one has made to become a lawyer. It is in these questions that we find stories and clues to the kind of ethics we will embrace as lawyers.

What am I doing in law school?
What did I give up to be here?
Is it worth it?
What sacrifices am I making?
What am I learning?
Am I learning to be a good lawyer?
Can a good lawyer be a good person?

These questions suggest that being a student of law engages more of who we are as persons than we sometimes admit. The development of a professional identity emerges from the concerns and expectations, hopes and dreams, that you bring with you to law school. The way a person lives her values and beliefs, the way we read our own life, affects the way law is learned and lawyering is practiced. The person that you are and the conflicts you live out constitute a story waiting to be told.

Try to imagine what your education means to you, what it has cost you, what it has made you as a person. What brought you to this place, doing what you do now, setting out as you have, to become a lawyer?

(iii) How do your memories of "home" (that place you have come from) find its way into the story you now make with your legal education yourself into a lawyer? How do those memories help you resist what your education as a lawyer would have you be?

(iv) What difficulties have you experienced in placing the images you brought with you to law school alongside the new ones law school has helped you create? In dealing with the different sources of images do you find yourself telling a story?

(v) If you were compelled to write an autobiography of your schooling, an autobiography of how schooling has made you the kind of person that you are, what story would you tell?

(2) How does being a woman affect the story you are telling in becoming a lawyer?

(3) If we are going to talk about our lives as lawyers, we must find a story that tells how we ended up in law school and what it means to be a lawyer.

We find our way through the world telling stories. The way we imagine ourselves and understand and reflect on the way our lives unfold as lawyers is a crucial part of the story we live.

You must come to your own conclusion as to whether seeing your own life as a story is worth the effort. Does it help you "see" your own life with greater clarity? Does it help you "see" what is going on in the world more clearly? Does it help you "think" about how to get from where you are now to where you might want to go?

How can we use stories, our own and those of others, to see ourselves more truthfully?

(i) Archaeology is defined as the study of a prehistoric culture by excavation and description of its remains. What would it mean to do an archaeology of self? Where would you begin? What kind of tools would you need?

An archaeological excavation might begin with where you are now--the place where you write, a sense of the room, the light from a window falling on the desk where you study, the sound of a typewriter, the sight of words appearing on a computer monitor. Richard Rodriquez, the author of an "intellectual biography" he calls The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 1983) tells of the days he spent in the reading room of the British Museum in London, and later, a "year of continuous silence" in a San Francisco apartment. (160, 3). Rodriquez writes of solitude and loneliness, the silence that he needed and feared, the mornings when he dreaded the isolation that his writing required, frustration with the "slowness of words," and his fear of confronting a blank page. (175-176).

Where do you write and study? Is there a time during your week for a period of "continuous silence"?

(ii) W.B. Yeats, the poet, is reputed to have said: "I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought." In becoming lawyers we become involved in an elaborate cultural narrative with mythic overtones. If we are to understand lawyering and ourselves as lawyers then we need to know something about the myths we embrace as lawyers.

What kind of myth are you living? How does this myth affect your image of yourself as a lawyer? As a person? How does it affect the view you have of yourself as an ethical person and an ethical lawyer?

If you do not see yourself as living out a myth is it possible that a myth is living you?

(iii) Imagine for a moment that your life is a journey. The idea here is to see the journey that you are on. You may see yourself as a wanderer or modern day pilgrim or on some other sort of journey. What kind of bearing does the journey metaphor have on the life you are trying to live?

What part of your life journey can you most easily describe? What part do you find yourself shying away from talking about?

How does imagining your life as a journey help you understand the kind of life you will try to live as a lawyer?

(4) Imagine for a moment your life as a story, an elaborate narrative that you have written out in the form of a manuscript. You have told the story of your life as you know it, a story about who you are, how you came to be in law school, what it feels like to undergo the rites of passage by which you authentically call yourself lawyer, and the struggle to make for yourself a life in which it is possible to be the kind of person you want to be.

Imagine that each chapter of the manuscript is a fragment, and that it will involve some effort of the reader to make the fragments (beginnings, ideals, shards of meaning, bruised and confused sentiments) into a mosaic of coherent meaning. The first draft of the chapter titles of the book might go something like this: Chapter One. This is Where I Came From. Chapter Two. Where I Imagine I Am Going. Chapter Three. People Who Have Left An Indelible Impression On Me. Chapter Four. Disappointments, Compromises, and Failures. Chapter Five. Talents and Skills. Chapter Six. Ideals and Beliefs. Chapter Seven. Conscience and Consciousness. Chapter Eight. Caring and Regard for Others. Chapter Nine. Connecting with Powers Greater than the Self.

Look at the chapter titles again. Life does not necessarily follow the linear path suggested by such a simple chronology. Rearrange the chapters. It would be equally plausible to see that life begins with Chapter Six and can be understand best, reading that chapter first, and then going to Chapter Two. There is nothing sacred about Chapter One being Chapter One. Chapter Six need not follow Chapter Five. A good story can start anywhere. In the text that is your life, the story can begin with chapter One and read to its conclusion, or begin with the chapter that you are living and read backward in time. Or the chapters can be read at random, ignoring the linear quality of a life history. The plot of your story may have twisted and turned so that beginnings and endings have become indistinguishable. Your life may be more interesting than your resume!

As we begin to think about the story of our own lives, we realize that each chapter takes place in the shadow of what has already happened, and that each new chapter is a preface to the chapter that follows it. A life is an endless series of prefaces and introductions to the lives we hope to live, to the stories we find (and lose) along the way.

Each chapter of life has its own beginning, history, and sense of completion. We do not begin our professional lives, the stories we tell of ourselves in the world of law, at Chapter Ten, or Chapter Five, or Chapter One. Each chapter is a beginning, an act of making a life that envisions a story worth telling.

(5) For many of us, we are so deeply enmeshed in the stories our culture assigns us we begin to think We are the culture. For a white, middle-class, American male this forgetting makes it possible to ignore culture. When we ignore culture we do not see how it works, how it makes and shapes our lives. We become blind to the character of culture (ethos).

For Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, middle-class culture was not "given." Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical story, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 1983) is about being "assimilated" into a culture not his own. The transition from a non-dominant Hispanic culture to mainstream culture is, for one who is "dark-skinned," as Rodriguez describes himself, costly. But Rodriguez is not the typical student; he attends one of the country's best universities and receives acclaim as a "scholarship boy." He becomes a writer. He has, by most definitions, made it. And it is this journey, from a Spanish-speaking culture to the world of middle-class English-speaking culture that is central to the story of Richard Rodriguez and his "hunger of memory."

[Seymour Wishman, in Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer also speaks of memory: "I had vague memories, hidden, it seemed, behind many thin, finely spun curtains. I knew I would have to try to draw the curtains back." (241). See also, Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage Books, 1956)]

Rodriguez tells a story about how education works for those who are assimilated into the cultural spotlight as public men and women. Rodriguez says, "[i]t is education that has altered my life." (5). And when a life is altered, changed, reformed and shaped to meet the demands of a predominant culture something is lost. There are many stories of how this loss takes place and how it affects one's life. For Rodriguez the journey is from one world to another, a journey he does not regret, but celebrates, a celebration accompanied with a deep sense of loss. "This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents." (5).

Mark Twain, when he became a river boat pilot, found that he had lost the ability to see the beauty of the river. Richard Rodriguez leaves the warm, sensual, intimacy of his Spanish home life to become a consumer of the American public school ethos and laments what he has left behind. Twain and Rodriguez do not ask us to stay at home, live in narrow worlds, but each laments what has been lost in their quest. If we cannot see what is lost we will allow our "ethics" used to justify success however gained.

An awareness of ethics begins with a sense of loss, an admission that we have given up something of value, that there is a cost to being a lawyer. We learn how ethics works when we realize the price that we pay for what we have become, what we have given up, what has been lost along the way.

The story Richard Rodriguez tells in Hunger of Memory is of a journey "away from the company of family and into the city." It is a coming of age story, an account of how a scholarship boy becomes a man by learning a new language, by an obsession with language that makes "public" existence possible.

In becoming a member of this "public" world Rodriguez begins to understand what it means to speak Spanish and English, the languages of family and the public world of Mexican-American scholarship boy. The radical dichotomy between these two language worlds, the private world of Spanish and the public world of English, is a stark one. "Lavish emotions texture home life. Then, at school the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily. Immediate needs set the pace of his parents' lives. From his mother and father the boy learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing. Then, at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of a reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action." (46). With the family, speaking Spanish at home there is a "celebration of sounds" (18), a warm intimate passing of information and learning to whom and with whom one belongs. With the Spanish of his parents, sisters, and brothers "voices insist[ing]: you belong here. We are family members. Related. Special to one another." (18).

Rodriguez learned English as a "public language," a language to make himself understood by others." (20). It is with language that we make ourselves understood, and perhaps more significantly, give validity to our experience of the world. To move from the intimate private world created by Spanish voices to the larger public world, "the special feeling of closeness at home" is "diminished." "Gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home." (22-23). The world is no longer a place of voices "teeming with pleasure. . . ." (18).

The transition from Spanish to English marks the end of childhood. "[T]he day I raised my hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire roomful of faces, my childhood started to end." (28). The process is complete when, many years later, he is able to say that "[h]e has used education to remake himself." (65). "I became a man by becoming a public man." (7).

Rodriguez tells the story of what is lost and at the same time celebrates his new world. "Only when I was able to think of myself as a American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality.... It is true that my public society today is often impersonal. . . . Yet despite the anonymity of the crowd and despite the fact that the individuality I achieve in public is often tenuous--because it depends on my being one in a crowd--I celebrate the day I acquired my new name [the day he pronounces his name as a English name]." (27).

(i) Rodriguez describes himself as a "scholarship boy." "I was a very good student; I was also a very bad student." (44). How does this paradoxical statement fit your own life as a student? Are you, like Rodriguez, "successful" but lacking confidence; "anxious and eager to learn" but "imitative and unoriginal"? (44). We understand how Rodriguez, moving from the language world of Spanish into the world of English, might be anxious, but how is your own anxiety as a student of law to be explained?

(ii) Rodriguez warns the reader that his intense devotion to studies had a paradoxical effect: "I became bookish, puzzling to all my family." (45). [Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (New York: William Morrow, 1974) speaks in similar terms of his relationship to his son, Chris, who finds the way his father talks, and thinks, puzzling.] Rodriguez's parents encourage him to study but are then puzzled by his devotion. His brother and sisters are good students but make fun of his being bookish. His mother asks: "What do you see in your books?" (45). In Freudian terms, his success has become over determined. Success is a problem.

How does your success as a student make you a puzzle to yourself and those around you?

| Remarks of Richard Rodriguez |

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