The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
Agreed. I thought I recognized the phenomena Lewis was describing up until this point, but this passage immediately contextualized several times in my life where I felt successful but unhappy: I wasn’t following his advice.
Maybe given that, I had hoped Lewis would spend more time talking about the cure and less about the diagnosis. But I can see the wisdom of the structure, as he gave this speech to students at Kings College who may not have enough lived experience to distinguish the Inner Ring from the “real inside…[which looks] exactly like an Inner Ring”. There’s tremendous value in setting the pattern and letting the human tendency towards apophenia take over.
Lewis’s Britishness exudes from the prose:
It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel.
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absolutely phenomenal advice.
Agreed. I thought I recognized the phenomena Lewis was describing up until this point, but this passage immediately contextualized several times in my life where I felt successful but unhappy: I wasn’t following his advice.
Maybe given that, I had hoped Lewis would spend more time talking about the cure and less about the diagnosis. But I can see the wisdom of the structure, as he gave this speech to students at Kings College who may not have enough lived experience to distinguish the Inner Ring from the “real inside…[which looks] exactly like an Inner Ring”. There’s tremendous value in setting the pattern and letting the human tendency towards apophenia take over.
Lewis’s Britishness exudes from the prose: