Page 164 - A Little Life: A Novel

and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the
second fails because logic is all they own.
He, however, was a good student—a great student—from the beginning,

but this greatness was often camouflaged in an aggressive nongreatness. I
knew, from listening to his answers in class, that he had everything he
needed to be a superb lawyer: it’s not accidental that law is called a trade,
and like all trades, what it demands most is a capacious memory, which he
had. What it demands next—again, like many trades—is the ability to see
the problem before you … and then, just as immediately, the rat’s tail of
problems that might follow. Much the way that, for a contractor, a house is

not just a structure—it’s a snarl of pipes engorging with ice in the winter, of
shingles swelling with humidity in the summer, of rain gutters belching up
fountains of water in the spring, of cement splitting in the first autumn cold
—so too is a house something else for a lawyer. A house is a locked safe
full of contracts, of liens, of future lawsuits, of possible violations: it
represents potential attacks on your property, on your goods, on your

person, on your privacy.
Of course, you can’t literally think like this all the time, or you’d drive
yourself crazy. And so for most lawyers, a house is, finally, just a house,
something to fill and fix and repaint and empty. But there’s a period in
which every law student—every good law student—finds that their vision
shifts, somehow, and realizes that the law is inescapable, that no interaction,
no aspect of daily life, escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a

shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A
marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable.
He could do this. He could take a case and see its end; it is very difficult
to do, because you have to be able to hold in your head all the possibilities,
all the probable consequences, and then choose which ones to worry over
and which to ignore. But what he also did—what he couldn’t stop himself

from doing—was wonder as well about the moral implications of the case.
And that is not helpful in law school. There were colleagues of mine who
wouldn’t let their students even say the words “right” and “wrong.” “Right
has nothing to do with it,” one of my professors used to bellow at us. “What
is the law? What does the law say?” (Law professors enjoy being theatrical;
all of us do.) Another, whenever the words were mentioned, would say
nothing, but walk over to the offender and hand him a little slip of paper, a