To: Samuel Johnson

From: A Supplicant

Re: Help With My CV

11 • 15 • 05

Dear Dr. Johnson:

I hope you will forgive this intrusion, but we the living require your assistance urgently. Believe me, I would not dream of troubling you had I not a pressing purpose. I write for my own sake but also on behalf of millions of contemporaries. Please help.

Of all the dead geniuses whose advice I might seek, I come to you because I happen to have recently read your 1740 essay on epitaphs. You remarked therein how strange it was that there should be no body of critical writing devoted to the epitaph. Critics are legion and busy, you noted timelessly, and their rules so numerous that they "become rather burdensome than instructive to the Mind." And yet as of 1740 that clever multitude had not seen fit to offer any word on a genre of writing as old, you speculated, as the written word itself. You proceeded to argue that it would be in the general interest to have some sound instructions regarding the writing of epitaphs (instructions you readily furnished), as epitaphs were perhaps the only form of writing in which everyone had a stake: "to afford a Subject for heroick Poems is the Privilege of very few, but every Man may expect to be recorded in an Epitaph."

Dr. Johnson, so much has changed. I won't bore you with the technical details but it is safe to say that record keeping has been considerably advanced since you wrote your essay. Information about all of us--proclivities, relationships, identities--is everywhere. Today we mortals are preoccupied less with ensuring that some written record of our lives remains after we're gone than with policing the information that circulates while we're alive. There is such a glut of data about each of us (one can scarcely buy a sensible cotton brief without having to offer one's postal code up to some sinister database) that a laudatory inscription on a stone no longer seems as valuable a document as it once did. In short, every man may no longer expect to be recorded in an epitaph.

But there is a form which is as ubiquitous in our day as the epitaph was in yours and it is with this form that we desperately need your help. In our own time, Dr. Johnson, every man and woman may expect to be recorded in a CV. The curriculum vitae is now the summarizing document by which nearly all of us, regardless of station or aspiration, are represented. And the form is so unworthy of us that I hardly know where to begin.

First, its name is a lie. And that creepiest kind of lie: one that claims the exact opposite of what is true. While the curriculum vitae purports (in Latin, as if more pretense were required) to describe the course of a life, nothing could be farther from the truth. The CV is in fact merely an abridged list of things one has done for money. It might be laid out chronologically, but it represents the course of no human being's life unless by accident. Indeed, exactly contrary to its name, the CV militates against narrative. It does this, first, by being one page long. (It used to be two, but the world is spinning very quickly these days and we've decided one life to one page is a more sensible ratio. We don't have all day.)

The CV further resists narrative in its fragmentation: its information is broken into bullets, which are in turn corraled into practical categories. Instead of being arranged into a story, these categories are organized in such a way that what is usually least meaningful to the person being described (recent work history) is foremost while what is usually most meaningful (I have a toddler! I am obsessed with bridge! I recently stopped hating myself! I'm in love! I have an unbelievable collection of tropical fish!) is absent or marginal, depending on appropriateness. (N.B. It is appropriate to add non-work-related enthusiasms to your CV only if they reek of go-getterism. Just completed a marathon in a time that'll take you to Boston? By all means include that. It will show them you can let your hair down.)

I hope you begin to see the seriousness of the problem. In its current form, the CV not only misrepresents but does violence to our lives. Perhaps you suspect I exaggerate. Can a simple page of bullet points really be so pernicious? Alas, the proof is all too near at hand. Dr. Johnson, the evil that usually lurks quietly at the heart of the CV springs to terrifying life in those who live with their CVs constantly in mind. Bloodless, manic, calculatingly inoffensive in word and deed, these lost souls embody everything the CV would do to us if we let it. When I, God willing, grow to be elderly and infirm, I would rather be set alight in my synthetic dressing gown by the most passionately antisocial teenager than be read to by some neatly pressed android who knows exactly how many minutes she must spend with me before she can mark the activity down on her application to dentistry school.

I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that there are those who will think my case frivolous. They will argue that the CV is a document designed for a specific purpose: to obtain employment for its subject. It is not meant to represent our inner lives or meditate on the question of our virtue. It's not evil, it's just--as a CV itself might put it--goal-oriented.

All that is fine as far as it goes, but I hope you of all dead people will be sympathetic to my less pragmatic view of the thing. Long ago you called for a thoughtful critique of the epitaph because it was the only form whose nature and quality intimately concerned every living soul. The same logic may be applied to the resume. Only a few of us will ever write an autobiography; a slightly larger number will enter into written correspondence that will outlive us; some will write books which may bear a trace of our lives and dispositions; but most of us will just dissolve into pixels--leftover emoticons and a handful of stale cookies. For hundreds of millions of us, our CVs are the closest we will come to creating any story about our lives. They are mercenary but they are all we have. Help us make them better.

You once wrote, "As Honours are paid to the Dead in order to incite others to the Imitation of their Excellencies, the principal Intention of Epitaphs is to perpetuate the examples of Virtue." If our epitaphs, those clarifying summaries, exist to coax others to virtue, might our CVs not let us glimpse our own lives in a shape that could show us the course to some higher purpose? Or, failing that lofty end, could they not be more dignified records of the fleeting works we have managed with these dying hands?

Awaiting your brilliant instructions,

A Supplicant