I wrote earlier this year (yes, I know, it’s only February) about the joy of spotting constellations when you read different ideas, in different places which seem to converge into some kind of pattern. I’ve also written about how our brains seem to be hardwired for stories – so constellation-spotting is probably just another part of the same sense-making toolkit.
And as that last sentence formed in my mind – poof – I completely lost my train of thought. When I started the paragraph I knew where I was going, now…no idea. Give me a moment…
No, still no idea. It’s quite worrying really. I had planned to write about an article I’d read: a review of a volume of John le Carre’s letters in The New Yorker…
I’d happened across the review quite by chance, as I was trying to clear an embarrassingly voluminous backlog of unread e-mails. One of the e-mails carried a teaser to the review and, being a le Carre fan, I thought I’d have a read. It was a really find piece of writing. While reading it was very satisfying in terms of the content, also was quite nauseating in terms of how well researched and constructed it was. It showed a little bit of a gulf between what I was churning out and what was being published by The New Yorker. Ok, so this was obviously a professional, commissioned piece and wasn’t turned around as part of some crackpot daily resolution-based habit, but nonetheless it gave me an appreciation and a reminder of the craft of professional writers.
I’m fairly certain that paragraph would have gone into whatever I’d planned to write, which was trying to draw some connections between disparate threads, in one of those poncey, meta pieces that I am prone to turn out with unoriginal regularity. Somewhere I was going to make a link to one of my favourite quotes. A quote I hold in such high regard, it features in my Twitter profile:
All we get is time and choices. Be wise with both.
Some wise old owl.
Le Carre seemed to appreciate this fact. He outgrew his schoolboy fetish for espionage, disenchanted by the duplicity involved. Instead he found that making his life by the pen, as he eloquently put it, was a more noble and impactful path to tread. Jennifer Wilson, in reviewing the le Carre letters and his novels, suggested a pattern to his work focusing on the honest calling of individuals:
Many of his characters are quiet, ordinary people longing for honourable work and finding, as we do, all paths riddled with complicity and compromise.
Jennifer Wilson, ‘John le Carre’s Search for a Vocation’, The New Yorker, January 16th 2023
I think this is quite wonderful, as is Wilson’s earlier description of work offering a form of identity to people:
That [le Carre] held the concept of vocation – of a job that could become a container of the self
Wilson, ibid
Wilson suggests that most people are motivated by wanting to do work which is good. This speaks to some of the reading and writing I’ve previously done about the teaching profession; linking also to the likes of Alex Quigley asking whether teaching is an intellectually rewarding profession (albeit satisfaction doesn’t have to be intellectual). It speaks to Howard Gardner’s research on ‘good work’ and truth, beauty and goodness. It asks us to reflect on one of those great, unspoken questions of modern Western society asking what it is really all about? How many people are really satisfied in their work? And if not from work, where is our satisfaction in life coming from? Which isn’t to suggest either that satisfaction can only come from work or that satisfaction from other sources cannot be meaningful, but it is certainly a topic worthy of reflection.
It interests me that le Carre’s work points to these questions. I note that this is Wilson’s interpretation, but haven’t read enough of le Carre’s work to categorically agree or disagree. Certainly from the works I have read, or watched adaptations of, I can certainly see those questions of goodness and rewarding work coming through, albeit not always as the premier message.
I think I’m getting to what I’d originally intended to write now. The review of le Carre had sparked a number of links in my mind, which I think I’ve covered, and on a personal note I was comforted to note that some of the questions I’ve asked around work, vocation and purpose are not as unique as I sometimes may have myself think.
Commonplace 