Years ago, when I was in my first year of university, a friend of mine wrote a long, slightly overcooked email to his father. This father had studied English literature, as my friend was then doing himself. The basic thrust of this email—and aren’t twenty-year-olds frankly terrible?—was How did you do what I am doing presently and end up where you are now?
My friend was a brilliant if inconsistent student. He loved the works he was reading, adored attending closely to great books and plays and poems, thinking deeply about the fundamental questions they posed. He wanted to know how his father could have inhabited the rarefied world of the university, concerned with beauty and truth, and still one day have settled down in suburbia in the southeast of England to work an undistinguished job in the middle management of a multinational corporation.