Feeling Vulnerable

“We live in a vulnerable society.”

That is a recurring refrain in Henning Mankell’s Firewall. Mankell is a Swedish writer of mystery novels, most of which feature Detective Kurt Wallander. You know Wallander is cool because in the BBC version he is played by Kenneth Branagh.

The 10 or so (depending on how you count them) Wallander novels are really good books in the Police Procedural type of mystery story. (These are not the whodunit novels perfected by Agatha Christie. Instead, you watch the police going through methodical steps trying to figure out what is going on and who is behind the troubles.) Firewall, I am sorry to say, is the weakest of the Wallander novels I have read. The reason why tells a tale.

The novel was originally published in 1998, which is fairly recent when compared to the history of the universe, but eons ago in computer age. Computers were common by the late 1990s, but the internet was just barely out of infancy. As a result, the world was neatly divided between people who knew how to use a computer and those who were helpless in front of a computer.

Firewall gets most of its tension from the fact that poor Kurt Wallander has absolutely no idea how computers work. None. He is afraid to even turn one on. It isn’t really clear that Mankell knows how computers work either, but he gets to mask his ignorance by having Wallander constantly tell people to skip all the technical details because he has no idea how computers work.

The lack of explanation about what is actually going on in the book when it comes to the computer stuff is a minor annoyance. Mankell writes well and Wallander is an interesting guy, so the book still works despite the goofy computer stuff. Well, it works until the last chapter when all the main mysteries are cleared up, but then the detectives riffle through a whole bunch of unexplained things from their investigations. I can’t remember a mystery novel with so many “clues” which are not only totally unexplained but actually inexplicable at the end of the book.

So much for the book. But, the line at the outset of this rumination, “We live in a vulnerable society,” is interesting. Why do the characters keep saying that? They are concerned about the fact that the world is becoming one giant interconnected computer web. A teenager in Sweden can hack into the Pentagon. A computer expert in the middle of nowhere can access every single large and important entity in the world. All you need is a computer and an internet connection and you can bring the whole world crumbling down.

Two decades later, we hear the same thing all the time. We are constantly under the threat of the entire internet, cell phones, satellites, electrical systems, missile defense systems, and financial systems, all of that going down at the same time leaving us in the Stone Age rubbing sticks together to make fire. (Have you ever tried to do that by the way? It is harder than it looks. Better start practicing.)

People feel vulnerable to cyberattacks. It worries them. A lot. So they say things like “We live in a vulnerable society.”

But do we? If the statement is mean simply to mean we do not live in a world with zero risk and thus are vulnerable to something, then obviously the answer is yes. But, that isn’t what the statement means. People are saying that we are more vulnerable now than we ever have been before. People are saying that because everything is connected to everything else, if you pull out just one small piece of wood, the whole thing collapses.

Are we now more vulnerable that we ever were before? Are we more threatened with disaster than at any time before?

Ages ago, imagine a human meeting a bear. Who wins? Yeah, humans have always been really vulnerable to wild animals…until we built better weapons. Then we became less vulnerable to them.

Famine? Drought? Locusts? Once upon a time, such things destroyed everything. Think of the Irish Potato Famine or the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. People were really vulnerable.

What about Blizzards and Hurricanes and Tornadoes and Floods? Again, once upon a time, such things were deadly to everyone in their path. People were really vulnerable.

Disease? The Black Death killed somewhere between 25% and 60% of the population of Europe. The Spanish Flu killed between 25 million and 100 million people (1.5% to 5% of the world’s population). Yeah, people used to be really vulnerable to plagues.

What is interesting about the modern world is how little vulnerability we have. Yes, I know that saying that right now in the midst of the “Greatest crisis of our lifetimes” seems like fighting words, but really it is not meant to be polemical at all. We actually are safer now, less vulnerable now to natural disasters and devastating catastrophes than ever before. As was noted in the recently reviewed Extreme Economies, a city can get absolutely leveled by a natural disaster in Indonesia, and a few years later a prosperous new city sits in exactly the same place. It is extraordinary when you think about it.

So, why do the characters in Firewall and people today constantly feel they are more vulnerable than in the past? I suspect it has to do with two things.

First, people understand Famines and Locusts; people do not understand Computers. So, if a giant swarm of locusts descends on your field and destroys your food supply, at least you can see the locusts munching away on what you planned to eat in winter. But a computer taking down the distribution network for food is mysterious, you don’t see it, and it can come from anywhere. That feels scarier even if it is not.

Second, because we are safer, every loss of safety, even a small one, feels very threatening. If every day you are looking up hoping there will not be too much or too little rain, then you know you are vulnerable. You never escape the feeling of vulnerability. But, now we live in an age where food is always plentiful at the grocery store, life spans are really long and medical care is jaw-droppingly amazing, and we are constantly in virtual contact with everyone. So any loss of that security, even a small loss of that security, ignites instant panic.

It’s a matter of perspective. Part of the problem with even talking about this is that the statement “We are less vulnerable today than ever before” is met with the retort (often angry) “We are still vulnerable!”  Of course we are still vulnerable. Less vulnerable does not mean invulnerable.

So, if you want to feel a bit better about life today, just look around at everything you have and be really glad you are not living in the 14th century or even the early 20th century.

Personal Legends: Yours and Mine

“And what went wrong when other alchemists tried to make gold and were unable to do so?”

“They were only looking for gold,” his companion answered. “They were seeking the treasure of their Personal Legend, without wanting actually to live out the Personal Legend.”

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is a tale of a journey. It is one of those philosophical novels that skips along lightly through the philosophy as we watch Our Hero discover the Meaning of Life. Minor characters come and go, each leaving their footprints in the sand, pointing the way to Discovery. Books like this are legion; there are enough of them that they probably even have a genre name, but (alas) I have no idea what it is. It’s not exactly a bildungsroman, but it is like a cousin of that genre.

Within this Yet-To-Be-Named Genre, The Alchemist is pretty good. The story is charming. Santiago, the hero, is a Spanish shepherd, who has a dream and embarks on a journey to find his treasure at the Great Pyramids. He is a persistent lad, overcoming obstacles and finding friends with his winning manner. It is, in other words, a perfect graduation gift.

But, it isn’t the book itself that intrigues me right now. It is the story of how I came to be reading this book right now.

The Great Coronavirus Semester just ended. Before the college shutdown, I had a class in which we just read books and got together to talk about them. When everyone went home, I told the students to just read a book and send me their thoughts about it. Seemed like a good way to finish off a class which was really never anything more than that in the first place.

There was a student in the class whom I had never met before the start of the semester. Great student who obviously loved reading books and talking about them. Exactly the sort of student with whom I always enjoy conversations. She’ll do well in life. A few weeks after the shutdown, she sent me her reflections on the book she read, which was (surprise plot twist) The Alchemist.

Now this novel has been on my “I should probably get around to reading it” list forever (well, technically not “forever” since the book was only published in the early 90s). So when I saw my student had just written a long reflection on it, I figured this was as good a time as any to read it.

The student’s reflections were fascinating. The story of the novel wove right into the story of her life and it all ended on a remarkably hopeful note looking at the future with determination. This student just graduated and is off on her journey to fulfill her Personal Legend. I have high hopes for her.

But, reading the novel and thinking about what my former student wrote about the novel led, naturally enough to thinking about my own Personal Legend.

The boy didn’t know what a person’s “Personal Legend” was.
“It’s what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is.
“At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend.”

So, what is mine? What is it I wanted to accomplish in life? Well, first, and presumably most obviously, build a life with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator and raise kids of whom we could both be proud. Check!

But then there is also this: to learn and to know and to pass on that learning and knowing to others.

My Personal Legend is to lead a life in books. But that life in books comes from interactions with my students. They inspire me to read more books and then I do everything I can to pass the inspiration back to other students.

The Alchemist turned into the metaphor of my Personal Legend. I taught a seminar that inspired a student to realize that reading books and thinking about her life was a marvelous way to live. She read this book, and wrote about how the book had become part of the warp and woof of her life. That inspired me to read the book and I realized how much the book was showing that my Personal Legend made me one of the minor characters in the lives of my students, helping them to set out on the journey of their Personal Legends. And, it is not the goal that is important, it is the journey. You can’t reach the goal of your Personal Legend without the journey of your Personal Legend.

And so, I read books. And I talk with my students about those books. And now I talk with you, Dear Reader, about these books.

At this time of Graduations, The Alchemist teaches this message: Don’t just think about the goals of your life. Don’t just want to have the gold you made. Remember that your Personal Legend is not the goal, it is the journey to the goal. That journey is happening even today. Today, you can take one step in the journey of your Personal Legend. Just one step. Not a big step. Not the overwhelming leap over the chasm that is in the way. Just one small step. The journey matters. The journey, after all, is your life.

Can Social Conservatives and Libertarians Still Be Friends?

On May 4th, American Compass was launched with “A Note of Introduction” declaring, “Our mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.” What followed was a remarkably anodyne discussion of the desire to be a flagship, “creating and nurturing connections between people, facilitating communication among them, and shaping a common identity understandable to the outside world.”

There is very little in the introductory note that would signal that American Compass has an agenda. But, a couple of months back, American Compass announced itself over at National Review in an essay by Oren Cass with the curious title “The Return of Conservative Economics.” I’ll admit my first thought in seeing the title was to wonder if supply and demand curves are different in the world of conservative economics. But, of course that is not what the title meant. Instead, the project is “helping American conservatism recover from its chronic case of market fundamentalism.”

The enemy, it seems, is not “liberal economics” or “socialist economics,” but rather libertarians. Now I am not a libertarian, but I must admit that I have heretofore thought of the libertarians I know as broadly reasonable people with policy preferences slightly different from mine. Reading American Compass’s views of the libertarians was thus, to put it mildly, a bit jarring. Fusionism, the melding of social conservatives, libertarians, and Cold Warriors that, as George Nash has so well documented, created the modern American Conservative movement, is now passé, especially among younger conservatives.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

What is a Social Science?

We hear a lot about the failures of economics to perfectly predict the future. I’ll admit to being puzzled about that argument. What is the measuring stick here? Is Economics worse at predicting the future than English Literature or Philosophy? Obviously not. But equally obviously, the comparison in the criticism of Economics is to Chemistry, Physics or Biology, which do very well at predicting the future in laboratory experiments.

Economists do like to compare themselves to the natural scientists. No Humanities, please, we are Scientists! This comparison of economics to the natural sciences elicits lots of derision, even from with the fold. Frank Knight, for example:

In the field of social policy, the pernicious notion of instrumentalism, resting on the claim or assumption of a parallelism between social and natural sciences, is actually one of the most serious of the sources of danger which threaten destruction to the values of what we have called civilization.

Knight wrote that in 1942. When you think of other possible threats to the values of civilization which were occurring in 1942, that claim is a little over-the-top. But even if we moderate the tone a bit, it is exactly the sort of thing that really begs the question: what is a social science?

A little history of the development of knowledge in the West is enough to show that the question of whether Economics is more akin to Chemistry or English Literature is not really as vital a question as most people imagine. It is really more interesting to ask whether Chemistry is really different than English Literature. Answer that, and the Economics question gets a lot easier.

When the idea of the liberal arts were being developed in Ancient Greece, there was not a distinction made between the three modern divisions in the Academy (Humanities, Sciences, Social Sciences). From Plato and Aristotle through Leonardo, it was common to see educated people working across what we now consider to be disparate disciplines. The liberal arts had great unity.

The beginnings of the Scientific Revolution mark an important break point. Newton’s massively important work commonly known simply as the Principia, was formally entitled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The title is important because first it shows the connection to the past in that Newton was writing what was considered to be a philosophical work, studying a branch of philosophy called “Natural Philosophy.” However, the work’s emphasis that Natural Philosophy is best understood using mathematical principles points to the future. Natural Philosophy subsequently had a different method than other types of philosophy. As Galileo expressed it earlier, the book of the universe is written in mathematics. (It is worth noting that Newton ended the Principia, which simultaneously invented calculus and explained the motions of the planets in the solar system, with a discussion of the implications of this work, saying that this massive book on the mathematical principles of natural philosophy proved that there was a God. Newton did not see himself as something other than a philosopher.)

Francis Bacon’s role in the development of science as something distinct from the humanities is also important to note. In “The Advancement of Learning” (which, recall, was published in 1605, 82 years before the Principia), Bacon articulated what we now call the scientific method. This was a new idea in the history of thought, that natural philosophy, or science, used a different method than the study of other areas. Bacon further proposed the creation of a scientific academy, memorably describing a fictional academy of this sort in The New Atlantis.

Looking at the work of these pioneers in the evolution of natural philosophy into a separate subject that we now call “science,” it is hard to overestimate how profound a break this was in the way we think about learning. In Aristotle, for example, there is no difference in method between his Physics, Poetics, Politics, or even Nicomachean Ethics. All these works read the same way. In the 21st century, there is no confusion about whether a particular book is a work of science or humanities. The methods themselves are quite different. The change was not instantaneous with the advent of the scientific revolution. The important scientific works of the 18th and 19th century were still written to be accessible to the generally educated reader. However, the specialization of the 20th century made these divisions complete. This is most evidenced by seeing the difference between the works of Einstein and Newton, both towering figures in the history of physics. Einstein’s important works are in technical articles written for specialists while Newton wrote expansive books written for everyone.

As the scientific method was being developed in the 19th century, people began to realize that the methods of science might also be useful to study things other than natural phenomenon. This realization was the birth of what we now call the Social Sciences. Note the name. The idea was to use scientific methods to study social phenomenon. Auguste Comte is often thought of as the most important pioneer in the development of something we can call the social sciences, but his importance is easily overstated. With the excitement of the discovery of all sorts of natural phenomena using these new methods of study, it was inevitable that people would begin to use the methods to study human interactions.

As the idea of using scientific methods to study social phenomena took hold, the disciplines we now group together in the social sciences gradually became distinct from both the humanities and the sciences. This idea of a distinct area called Social Science was also a novel idea in the history of thought. Adam Smith, for example, is generally credited as being the first economist on the basis of his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is, it is well worth noting, a vastly more extensive book than people who have never read it in its entirety would realize. This book was Smith’s second book, however. His first, also a massively important text in the Scottish Enlightenment, was Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith did not view himself as an “economist,” in other words. He was an old fashioned philosopher.

The philosophers of the 19th century who we now consider to be “economists” would similarly have rejected the idea they were writing in a narrow discipline for a specialized audience. One can profitably read Malthus and Ricardo and Marx and Mill regardless of one’s area of modern specialization. The break in economics came in the early 20th century, not insignificantly at the very time Einstein was creating a break in the writing about physics. The early 20th century, led by extremely influential books by Alfred Marshall (in England) and Leon Walras (in France), set economics on the path to becoming a separate discipline within the broader realm of the social sciences. The participants of this broader transition in the study of economics figured out how to use mathematics as a vehicle for uncovering regularities in economics and social behavior. They were, in other words, explicitly using the scientific methods pioneered by the early scientists to study social phenomena. Perhaps the laws of society, like the laws of nature, are also written in the language of mathematics.

As the discipline of economics grew, this emphasis on using mathematics and statistics to create and test models of reality has become the defining characteristic of the field. In other words, it is the very fact that economics uses tools of this sort that makes it a social science instead of one of the disciplines in the humanities.

Is economics then a science? This has been an extensively debated question in the philosophy of science. The proposition that it is a science is difficult to defend without using a definition of science so broad that it would include any application of mathematics and statistics to understanding the world. As the terms become understood in the 20th century, the social sciences were distinct from the sciences by the nature of their objects of study. While both the sciences and social sciences study people, the historical distinction was that the sciences studied the mechanical aspects of people while the social sciences studied the results of the decisions made by people.

There is, as we have seen, no natural reason to divide the liberal arts into three categories. There is no reason at all other than historical tradition that we do not have 2 or 4 or 12 divisions in the Academy. Moreover, the walls between the realms of knowledge are constantly under assault. Sociobiology, for example, argues that science can be used to explain all of human history, that the discipline of history itself should really be considered to be a subject of biology. These assaults on the walls of separation are not surprising given the relatively recent history of the walls themselves. As Robert Frost noted, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Incidentally, for an added bonus, think about when this poem was published relative to the other works discussed in this section. Not a coincidence.)

Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Back when I was enrolled in the obligatory American literature class in high school, we read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

It bored me to tears. I had no idea why I was reading a whole bunch of boring conversations between boring people.

Now, it is only fair to note that when I was in high school, my literary tastes were unrefined. Well, that is putting it mildly; I had no taste. So, my high school reaction to books is generally not even remotely accurate. But, in this case, I was actually not too far off. This novel really is a record of a bunch of boring conversations between boring people. That, as my older self realizes, is exactly the point.

A bunch of Americans living in Paris after War War I spend all their time roaming around bars, pretending to both work and sleep when they aren’t at the bar. They drink a lot. They talk about drinking even more which apparently makes them thirsty so they have another drink. They swap meaningless gossip. They trade insults, which every now and then results in a drunken brawl. They pout when things don’t go their way, which since they have no way, is all the time. There is, of course, a girl. Everyone likes Brett. So, they fight over her too. She doesn’t mind much. One might suspect she encourages it. Then, because they are bored, one day they all head down to Spain to, you know, drink and have more boring conversations.

There are two things that break up this pattern. First, there is the closest thing to a genuine love story in the whole novel. The narrator, Jake, and the girl, Brett, love one another. They have loved one another for years. Yet, they cannot run off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Why not? Jake’s war injury. The nature of this injury is never explicitly stated, so I suspect I totally missed it in high school. It’s hard to imagine we actually talked about it in class. Jake, you see, is impotent. Symbolism Alert!

I’d love to rewind and go back to see those discussions in my high school class which read this book. Did we really skip over the single most important detail in this novel, the detail which makes the book something other than boring people having boring conversations? Or did we discuss it, and somehow I forgot all about what must have been the most risqué conversation we ever had in an actual class in my high school? I have no idea.

Then we get to the other part of the novel which rises above all those deliberately boring conversations. Bull-fighting. While in Spain, our something-less-than-merry band goes to watch the bullfighting. Brett, in particular, is enraptured by the bull-fighting, and in particular the young bull-fighter so attractive that he is guaranteed to make every young heart swoon.

When Hemingway comes to write about the bulls, the prose noticeably shifts. Instead of the lazy, boring conversations of the bar, we get vivacious descriptions of bulls charging. The bulls are full of life, surging and thrusting their horns. The bullfighters do a delicate dance of teasing the bull just enough to get it to charge but then at the last minute dancing away, frustrating the bull, so the bull charges again with even greater fervor only to be frustrated again and again and again as the tension builds and builds and builds. In the end, the bull is slain by the bullfighter and falls limply to the ground. Yeah, if you don’t blush when reading Hemingway’s descriptions of the bullfights you aren’t paying attention. As Brett becomes increasingly excited, as Jake watches the bullfights with a sense of longing, if you don’t notice what is happening, you really aren’t paying attention. Way beyond symbolism alert.

We had that disturbed emotional feeling that comes after a bull-fight, and that feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight.

I found that quote, by the way, simply by opening the book to a random page in the section about Spain. I had no idea what was going on in this book when I read it in high school. None.

Which raises the question: why do people assume that every Great Book is equally good to use in high school English classes? In what world is The Sun Also Rises the best book to give to an 11th grade class? Even if you want to use Hemingway in high school, this is not the book to use. The Old Man and the Sea works vastly better with high school students. It has themes a 16 year old could appreciate. What 16 year old needs to reflect on the impotence of middle age when dreams have died and there is no life to sustain a day-to-day existence? What 17 year old needs a primer on the power of, ahem, bull-fighting to recapture a lost youth?

The Sun Also Rises and the Sun Goes Down. One generation ends and another begins. What abides? The old ennui. Decades after Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, the King of Cool, sang about it. Decades after Sinatra, Kurt Cobain sang about it. Decades after Cobain, you are reading a blog post about a book about bored people having boring conversations. The Earth abides. Hemingway and the Preacher have spoken.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

A Second-Rate Potter

Late in his life, T.S. Eliot took to writing plays in verse.

I don’t know why; he was never going to be a great playwright.

But, I guess when you are famous, you can do whatever you want.

A couple of his plays have some amazing bits in them. Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party both work well if you think of them as verse in play form. That is entirely different from being great plays, though. A couple of his plays are not good verse or play, containing rather a few scattered interesting lines here and there (The Family Reunion and The Elder Statesmen).

The Confidential Clerk is only one of his plays that I can imagine making a good, you know, play. Acted right, it could be good. There are also some interesting philosophical matters in it. The ideas and the verse aren’t as good as in his best two plays, but there is actually a plot that makes the thing a play. I’m not entirely convinced I would go out to see a production of it, though.

How to describe it? “Sort of like Twelfth Night, but if J. Alfred Prufrock was the main character.”1 The Prufrock comparison is perfect as the discussion below will show. Twelfth Night stands in for one of those plays where everyone is mistaken for someone else and in the end everything gets sorted out. I am not sure that Twelfth Night is really the best comparison, though. The Confidential Clerk is more like one of those drawing room comedies where we are surprised by finding out who all the characters really are. But Eliot would like the Shakespeare comparison more, so let’s give it to him. (Plus, we might as well be charitable to Shakespeare when we have the chance—he really is as good as Eliot.)

The philosophical problem around which the play is centered is the question of identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who do others think you are? One might think that it would be a good idea if the answer to all three of those questions is the same. But as the wealthy financier notes, he really wanted to be a potter, but he had to give up that dream:

Because I came to see
That I should never have become a first-rate potter.
I didn’t have it in me. It’s strange, isn’t it.
That a man should have a consuming passion
To do something for which he lacks the capacity?
Could a man be said to have a vocation
To be a second-rate potter?

Is there something wrong with being second-rate potter?

If your dream is to be a first-rate potter, but you only have the choice of being a second-rate potter or a first-rate financier, which is the better option? There is no doubt that the entire educational apparatus these days tells you to be first-rate. Thoreau, meanwhile, screams at you to proudly be a potter.

But, the deeper question is more than the old debate of what you should do with your life. Is it possible that your vocation, your calling in life, is to be a second-rate potter? Is it possible that being a second-rate potter isn’t just settling into a life you prefer, but actually the very best use of your time on earth? Is it possible that you will do more good as a second-rate potter than as a first-rate financier? Why couldn’t you have a calling to be mediocre? And, if that is your calling, your vocation, your purpose in life, shouldn’t you proudly pursue it?

As the young protégé replies,

Indeed, I have felt, while you’ve been talking.
That it’s my own feelings you have expressed,
Although the medium is different. I know
I should never have become a great organist,
As I aspired to be. I’m not an executant;
I’m only a shadow of the great composers.
Always, when I play to myself,
I hear the music I should like to have written.
As the composer heard it when it came to him;
But when I played before other people
I was always conscious that what they heard
Was not what I hear when I play to myself.
What I hear is a great musician’s music.
What they hear is an inferior rendering.
So I’ve given up trying to play to other people:
I am only happy when I play to myself.

Is he right to give up his dream?

Moreover, when you abandon the vocation you thought you had when you realized you would always be second-rate, can you really build a new life on make-believe?

My father— your grandfather— built up this business
Starting from nothing. It was his passion.
He loved it with the same devotion
That I gave to clay, and what could be done with it—
What I hoped I could do with it. I thought I despised him
When I was young. And yet I was in awe of him.
I was wrong, in both. I loathed this occupation
Until I began to feel my power in it.
The life changed me, as it is changing you:
It begins as a kind of make-believe
And the make-believing makes it real.

The problem is obvious. You can be successful by outward measures in your make-believe world. You may even move from success to success to success. But, inside, you’ll always know:

If you have two lives
Which have nothing whatever to do with each other—
Well, they’re both unreal.

There is the Prufrock problem:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

How long can you keep this up? If the person you are is not the same as the person you want to be, and if neither of those is the person the world sees, how long can you keep going? Is this triple life you are leading really better than just being a second-rate potter and feeling satisfied and happy in being a second-rate potter and having the world knew you are a second-rate potter?

Eliot’s solution to this problem in the play is cheating. It is, in fact, so transparently a cheat that Eliot surely knew it was. It is almost like Eliot knew he was a second rate playwright, but he really wanted to write plays.

1Izzy Baird, personal communication, April 7, 2020.
[Yeah, Izzy really wanted a footnote.]

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