Judge Sotomayor's Loneliness

I hung onto every word of this morning's New York Times profile of Sonia Sotomayor. I confess having been somewhat underwhelmed with Judge Sotomayor as a Supreme Court choice. It's not I think she's a racist or a radical or any of the rest of the silliness that the slime machine has been throwing at her. It's rather simply because she struck me as a bit of an overachiever: a super-hard worker who can and does achieve a lot because, when you get right down to it, the practice of law is a form of the higher drudgery at which overachievers can often do pretty well.

The Times piece did an admirable of presenting her as three-dimensional human being. "To Get to Sotomayor’s Core," the Times reports, "Start in New York," fleshing its account out with winning and plausible tidbits about the Yankees. That's a plausible hook and the musters plenty of evidence to support it, but what struck me more than New York per se was the manic, obsessive pace of her life, coupled with what presents itself to all appearances as an appalling loneliness.

Granted, "lonely" may seem like an unlikely word to apply to somebody whose life is so full of her law clerks, her family, her colleagues, her friends--"a Puerto Rican tía, an aunt, replete with dishes of rice and chicken." But the story may tell more than it knows. "“You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,” the Times quotes a friend as saying. And here's the ex-husband, and the ex-boyfriend--amicable separations both, so it appears (at least they have the sense not to throw bottles and dead cats at each other). “I cannot attribute that divorce to work," she tells the Times--anbd then goes on to do exactly that, without seeming to notice how flatly she contradicts herself. Another friend says she "walks with purpose," but the more you read, the more you wonder what the purpose might be, and whether she knows herself.

And now, if the Lord is willin' and the creek don't rise, she's off to Washington, to a new assignment in a new environment even more isolating and disconnected than the one in which she has spent her life. I wish her well. I think she is a well-intentioned choice and heaven knows she will do everything she knows how to make the best of it. But it's a little chilling to think of imposing all that burden on somebody who seems to face life so completely alone.