Topical Guide 527
Mark Dorset
Failure and Humiliation: Fear of
Fear: of Failure and Humiliation
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 6:
He had, he allows himself to realize now, been fearing the presentation for weeks. He had feared that his star was dimming at Manning & Rafter, and he had begun to think about what he would do if — he almost thought of it as when — the brick maker was rejected. He really couldn’t afford to quit. He supposed that the only thing he could do would be to endure, to suffer whatever blows his ego would have to take, and stay on, go on, show up every day and do whatever was left to him to do, until he was dismissed, with salary continuance and health insurance and the vested portion of his retirement fund, or until he could afford to let himself be pushed into an early retirement. How long could he wait? Ten years? Could he survive so strong a daily dose of humiliation for that long?
Rampion in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point:
“You’ve got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll all starve. Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically, and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be. Don’t mix the two lives together; keep the bulkheads watertight between them. The genuine human life in your leisure hours is the real thing. The other’s just a dirty job that’s got to be done. And never forget that it is dirty and, except in so far as it keeps you fed and society intact, utterly unimportant, utterly irrelevant to the real human life.”
“Inspiration”
Persistence
Failure, Acceptance of
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 6:
[…] he saw some children making a sand castle at Horseneck Beach, and out of their improvised play came the idea for this toy, a set of molds for sand and, most important, a ramming device that packs the sand into the molds to make bricks that will interlock. […] and he gets a secret thrill each time he recalls the castle that inspired the idea, because in truth it wasn’t children he observed building it, but a woman, a blonde who was sitting on the wet sand at the water’s edge, molding bricks of sand in an empty juice container and building with the bricks she made.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities:
The solution of an intellectual problem comes about in a way not very different from what happens when a dog carrying a stick in its mouth tries to get through a narrow door: it will go on turning its head left and right until the stick slips through. We do pretty much the same, . . . and although of course a head with brains in it has far more skill and experience in these turnings and twistings than an empty one, yet even for it the slipping through comes as a surprise, is something that just suddenly happens; and one can quite distinctly perceive in oneself a faintly nonplussed feeling that one’s thoughts have created themselves instead of waiting for their originator. This nonplussed feeling refers to something that many people nowadays call intuition, whereas formerly it used to be called inspiration, and they think they must see something suprapersonal in it; but it is only something non-personal, namely the affinity and kinship of the things themselves that meet inside one’s head.
New York Botanical Garden, July 24, 2016:
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