welcome back my friends to the big book
podcast
my name is howard and i'm an alcoholic
sober since january 1st 1988
one day at a time this is the 63rd
episode and features the reading of the
third story in part two of the personal
stories section
of the second edition of alcoholics
anonymous published in 1955.
it's another short story entitled the
professor
and the paradox and was written by john
p
it appeared only in the second edition
which is why most aas have never seen it
though it's a really powerful story john
p wrote a poignant update to his big
book story
for the july 1967 issue of the grapevine
with the perspective of 12 years of
sobriety john said
in a.a we don't just quit drinking we
learn to change our self-centeredness
to stop running away from things we
don't like and to remove or
at least adjust our emotional
shortcomings
we do these things by taking seriously
and honestly
our 12 steps the nearest thing to a cure
for alcoholism
that anybody has yet discovered he went
on to say
we learn to do these things not just by
memorizing the steps
though that is a good idea but by
attempting to live and act them
each day of our lives and eventually
often when we least expect it
we discover that as a result of all this
we are happy and contented and full of
thanksgiving
something i once knew or thought i knew
i could never be
without drinking and now
part two story three
the professor and the paradox
says he we a surrender to win
we give away to keep we suffer to get
well
and we die to live
i am in the public information business
i use that phrase or
designation because if i say i am a
college professor
everybody always has a tendency to run
the other way
and when they learn that i am a
specialist in english
they have looks of horror for fear that
they are going to slip up and say
ain't i often wish i sold shoes or
insurance or
fixed automobiles or plumbed pipes i
would have more friends
my story is not a great deal different
from others except in a few specific
details
all the roads of alcoholism lead to the
same place and condition
i suppose i have always been shy
sensitive fearful envious and resentful
which in turn leads one to be arrogantly
independent
a defiant personality i believe i got a
phd degree
principally because i wanted to either
out do or
defy everybody else i have published a
great deal of scholarly research
i think for the same reason such
determination
such striving for perfection is
undoubtedly an admirable and practical
quality to have
for a while but when a person mixes such
a quality with alcohol
that quality can eventually cut him
almost to pieces
at least it did so to me i began
drinking as a social drinker in my early
20s
drinking constituted no problem for me
until well after i finished graduate
school
at the age of 30. but as the tensions
and anxieties of my life began to mount
and the setbacks from perfection began
to increase i finally slipped over the
line between moderate drinking and
alcoholism
no longer would i drink a few beers or a
cocktail or two and let it go at that
no longer did i let months or even weeks
go by without liquor
and when drinking i entered what i now
know was the dream world of alcoholic
fantasy
then for about five years of
progressively worse alcoholic drinking
of filling my life and home with more
and more wreckage it looked as if i were
going to ride this toboggan of
destruction
to the bitter end maybe i didn't get as
bad as some of the others
i must confess that i never went to
teach one of my classes drunk or
drinking
but i've been awfully hungover my
pattern was to be drunk at night
boil myself out to creep to work in the
morning
drunk the next night boil myself out in
the morning
drunk again the next night boil myself
out the next morning
i may not have drunk as much whiskey as
some but there isn't
anybody who's drunk any more cell
hepatica than i have
now there are all kinds of drunks
melancholy drunks
weeping drunks traveling drunks slap
happy and stupid drunks
and a number of other varieties i was a
self-aggrandizing and occasionally
violent drunk
you wouldn't think a little fellow like
me could do much damage
but when i'm drunk i'm pure dynamite i'm
not going into any of the details
the university can fire me yet i came to
believe
actually that life was not worth living
unless i could drink
i was utterly miserable and sometimes
desperate living always with a feeling
of impending calamity
i knew something was bound to break
loose and to do away with such a fear
i would try a little more drinking with
the inevitable result
for by this time one drink would set up
in me that
irresistible urge to take another and
another
until i was down or hung over and in
trouble
in the hungover stage i would vow never
to touch another drop
and then be drunk the next night
i knew at least that there had to be
some changes made
i tried to change the time and place and
amount of my drinking
i tried to change my environment my
place of living
like most of us who at one time or
another think that our trouble is
geography rather than whiskey
i even entertained the idea of changing
wives
i tried to change everything and
everybody
except myself the only thing i could
change
i did not know that it was physically
impossible for me to drink moderately
i did not know that my body's drinking
machinery had worn out
and that the parts could not be replaced
i did not know that just one drink made
it impossible
for me to control my behavior in conduct
and my future drinking
i did not know in short that i was
powerless over alcohol
my family and my friends sensed or knew
these things about me
long before i did finally as with most
of us
in aaa the crisis came i realized i had
a drinking problem
which had to be solved my wife and a
close friend tried to persuade me to
contact the only member of alcoholics
anonymous we knew of in town
this i refused to do but i agreed that i
would stop drinking altogether
maintaining stoutly and sincerely that i
could
and would solve this problem on my own
i would feel much better doing it that
way i insisted
i stayed sober for two entire weeks
then i pitched a lulu a terrific drunken
affair
in which i became violently insane i
also landed in the city jail i don't
know exactly what happened on this
bender
but here are some things that did happen
which i was told about subsequently
first the officers who had come out to
my house
did not want to take me in but i
insisted
also i insisted that they wait in the
living room while i went back to the
bedroom and changed into my best and
newest suit
with socks and ties to match so that i
would look nice in jail
i don't remember the ride downtown but
when i came to in the jail corridor
i didn't like the looks of the little
cage they were shoving me into
so i took issue about that with three
officers
and indulged in some fisticuffs with all
three of them at once
each one of them twice my size and armed
with a gun
and a blackjack now what kind of
thinking and acting is that
if that isn't insanity or absurd
grandiosity or
some sort of mental illness what is it
because i yelled so loud
and made so much noise i ended up
downstairs under the concrete in a place
they call
solitary that's a fine place now isn't
it
for a college professor to spend the
night two days later i was willing to
try a
a which i had only vaguely heard of a
few months before
i called it the home of the man who
started the aaa group in my town
and i went humbly with him to an aaa
meeting the following night
as i look back something must have
happened to me during those two days
some forces must have been at work which
i do not understand
but on those two days between jail and
aaa
something happened to me that had never
happened before
i repeat i don't know what it was maybe
i had made a decision
just a part of step three i had made
lots of promises but never a decision
though it seems to me that i was at the
time too confused and fogged up
to make much of one maybe it was the
guiding hand of god or
as we baptist say the holy spirit i like
to think that it was just that
followed by my own attempt to take the
12 steps to recovery
whatever it was i have been in aa and i
have been dry
ever since that was more than six years
ago
aa does not function in a way which
people normally expect it to
for example instead of using our
willpower as everyone outside
aa seems to think we do we give up our
wills to a higher power
place our lives in hands invisible hands
stronger than ours
another example if 20 or 30 of us real
drunks get away from home
and meet in a club room downtown on
saturday night
the normal expectation is that all 30 of
us will surely get
roaring drunk but it doesn't work out
that way does it
or talking about whiskey and old
drinking days
one would normally think is sure to
raise a thirst
but it doesn't work that way either does
it our program and procedures seem to be
in many ways
contrary to normal opinion and so
in connection with this idea let me pass
on what i consider the four paradoxes of
how a a works
a paradox you probably already know is a
statement which is seemingly
self-contradictory
a statement which appears to be false
but which
upon careful examination in certain
instances
proves to be true one
we surrender to win on the face of it
surrendering certainly does not seem
like winning
but it is an aa only after we have come
to the end of our rope
hit a stone wall in some aspect of our
lives
beyond which we can go no further only
when we hit
bottom in despair and surrender can we
accomplish sobriety
which we could never accomplish before
we must and we do
surrender in order to win two
we give away to keep that seems absurd
and untrue
how can you keep anything if you give it
away but in order to keep whatever it is
we get in a
a we must go about giving it away to
others
for no fees or rewards of any kind
when we cannot afford to give away what
we have received so freely in a.a
we had better get ready for our next
drunk
it will happen every time we've got to
continue to give it away
in order to keep it three
we suffer to get well there is no way to
escape the terrible
suffering of remorse and regret and
shame and embarrassment which starts us
on the road to getting well from our
affliction
there's no way to shake out a hangover
it's painful and for us
necessarily so i told this to a friend
of mine as he sat
weaving to and fro on the side of the
bed in terrible shape about to die for
some peralta hide
i said lost john that's his nickname
lost john
you know you're going to have to do a
certain amount of shaking sooner or
later
well he said for god's sake let's make
it later
we suffer to get well four
we die to live this is a beautiful
paradox
straight out of the biblical idea of
being born again
or in losing one's life to find it
when we work at our twelve steps the old
life of guzzling and fuzzy thinking and
all that goes with it
gradually dies and we acquire a
different
and a better way of life as our
shortcomings are removed
one life of us dies and another life of
us
lives we in a a die to live
this concludes the reading of the
professor and the paradox
from part two of the personal stories
section of the second edition of
alcoholics anonymous
i'm grateful you listened stay tuned for
our 64th episode
which features story 4 entitled a flower
of the south
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book
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[Music]
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