The Catch-22

The writer’s Catch-22. His job is to seek enlightenment toward the true nature of reality, the meaning behind daily events. This is his profession. For this, he is in need of respecting his time and efforts at this work as a profession. He needs some form of payment, that however he goes about his work he is gaining something in terms of money and respect and security. When his work is treated as a profession, he is able to continue to do it, to find the help he needs to complete at least some of his tasks.

Enlightenment is difficult without having some basic things at hand. A man needs a wife, as a relationship, viewed properly, is the engine for achieving his task. If however, he is not rewarded for his work to begin with, then he will be without all the things that provide for the security necessary to enjoy the privileges of a marital relationship. Without success, the success made possible by her very support and presence, he will not be viewed as able to have such a relationship.

And so, a society based on materialism and the kind of financial security only obtained through secondary jobs gives rise to those who cleverly fake enlightenment. The actor who can skillfully act out what enlightenment might look like will reap far more reward than the writer who tinkers away and makes real gains toward broader understandings and higher consciousness. A financier will concoct clever schemes to appear to have solved the basic mystery of how to make money and get rich so that he will gain the mantle of success that allow him to earn more successes, the very appearance and mirages being an integral part of his scheme. And so we have the phenomenon of Mr. Madoff. In a certain sense, he claimed an insight into some form of enlightenment that allowed him to provide for a beautiful wife. (And she helped him at whatever he was engaged in, with her support.) However, his basic modus operandi was dishonest, a complete fake, even as the illusions of his success as financial guru grew and grew. He claimed the cart before the horse, the ways and trappings of wealth without any means to really earn it.

A writer, an honest one, stands in contrast (or does he?) to such a model as Mr. Madoff and those in financial services who perpetuated another kind of false sense of security in the form of sub-prime mortgages which brought security to those who thought they could own a home and also those who invested their fond wishes and hard work and wages in those sketchy loans in the form of mortgages and housing booms.

So particularly today, the writer’s job is a serious one, to uncover things which are true in that those things have value, value toward gaining a proper understanding of the true nature of human reality.

The worst facet of following the voices preaching quick and solid returns--and perhaps poor beautiful Mrs. Madoff finds herself in a symptomatic spot--is that the nation has leaned toward a lack of curiosity, a willful ignorance toward the deep matters of life, become more purely commercial, fostered a dimming of intellect, a fascination with glittery surfaces of non-substantial things too quick and too easy with little behind them. Whereas there are some real things known to human beings, like fellowship, sympathetic compassion, a sense of daily struggle, a looking for some meaning to it all.

The writer, turning quietly inward, is alone, with little to help him but the knowledge that he is at the very center of the most important matters, even as news cameras point nervously away to symptom after symptom, one bad thing after another, without gracing upon the simple honestly of a good question.

Hemingway’s early stories are permeated with a sense of humor over the basic situation, maintaining their edge against simple unquestioning bitterness over the writer finding himself alone in Modern America.