Page 163 - A Little Life: A Novel

It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most
difficult time in their first year—law school, particularly the first year of
law school, is really not a place where creativity, abstract thought, and

imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think—based upon what I’ve
heard, not what I know firsthand—that it’s a bit like art school.
Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a
tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and
she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or
twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and
blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a

grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons,
however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older,
and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to
draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they
wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to
pin up on the wall for praise and critique.

But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence.
Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny
ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-
dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a
head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got
worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never
displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he

saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a
dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about
proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.
He decided to speak to his professor. We are meant to break you down,
Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come
back from it.

“I guess I wasn’t one of the truly talented,” Dennys would say. He
became a barrister instead, lived in London with his partner.
“Poor Dennys,” Julia would say.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Dennys would sigh, but none of us were convinced.
And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets,
and artists don’t often do well in law school (unless they are bad novelists,
poets, and artists), but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians,