Cracking into the first three chapters of Maugham’s 1944 spiritual odyssey.
Why do we love Larry so much? Rich talks about his own years of loafing around. Is Larry’s decision to take a step off the beaten path less admirable given his ‘trifling’ $54,000 inflation-adjusted stipend?
Talking about the spergy drive to collect All the Knowledge, and how to think about which problems to work on. Is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake a noble activity, or should we actually be building stuff in the world?
Synopsis
Cam: That just reminded me of a Family Guy episode. The son, Chris, calls out to Peter — he’s like, “Dad, Mom’s on the phone.” And he’s like, “please be Somerset Maugham, please be Somerset Maugham, please be Somerset Maugham.”
Rich: Somerset Maugham is a crazy fucking name, hey.
Benny: Yeah, it’s wild.
Cam: What’s the W for?
Rich: It stands for William, I believe. Wilhelm or William.
Benny: William.
Cam: Makes sense.
Rich: Okay, so Larry is a young pilot who is struggling to return to his former life after World War One. He is engaged to Isabel, who is a charming young lady with a close relationship to her uncle Elliot Templeton, a snob and social climber who is an old friend of the author insert novelist who’s telling this story to us. Larry rejects a job offer from his friend Gray’s father, who is a prominent stockbroker, as he instead wishes to loaf about, which seems to involve reading books, traveling and educating himself. He moves to Paris for a couple of years. Isabel and her mother go to visit him, but he refuses to come home with her because he’s still trying to find out the answers to these existential questions in life. He invites her to live with him as his wife in Paris, but she rejects his offer and they break off the engagement. I don’t know what more there is in the chapters because I can’t remember, but that’s sort of the main thread, right?
Cam: Yeah, that’s good.
Benny: The part two ends with Isabel chatting with the author.
Cam: So do you reckon these are real people, or are they just totally made up?
Rich: So fiction is, like, you actually come up with characters, and… I know you’re new to it.
Cam: So Maugham is totally — total fantasy?
Rich: No, it’s a good question. I mean, the novelist is him himself, right, pretty clearly. And then I think the other characters are heavily inspired by real life people, but it’s not, like, a “based on true events” biopic or whatever. Larry is his, like, fantasy hot young piece of ass, I assume. Like, I fucking love Larry. Everyone loves Larry.
Everyone loves Larry
Benny: Yeah. Everyone loves Larry. Do you guys identify with Larry?
Rich: Yeah, would you guys go gay for Larry?
Cam: Quit my job and go to Greece — yeah, I… so yeah, it’s mainly a tick.
Rich: Cam doesn’t answer the question. Interesting.
Cam: Would I go for Larry? I’m not sure he’s got the right trade-off of responsibility for family and following your interests, you know. I did relate to Larry. The one thing that I think I’m always going to remember from this book is that set piece near the start of Larry reading William James’s Principles of Psychology at the library all day. You could imagine that scene so well. You see him. I think he doesn’t show the book at first, which — I don’t know how much he’s sort of aware of hiding that. But I think he just genuinely isn’t that concerned about status. And then you just see him there at night. Did you guys ever, for a while at university, or in between university and work — I tried to do that a bit, sort of go to the library and read. And it would never be too hard stuff. It’s hard to just sit and read for, like, four hours, let alone ten hours.
Rich: So it feels like this book was designed to make us love it, at least in the first couple of chapters. I agree it gets a bit more complex later on, but this guy is — he’s our kind of guy, right? It’s not just the William James, it’s that he doesn’t give a fuck about social signaling and status games, and he’s very polite but he’s not interested in the trappings of high society.
Cam: It’s likeable.
Rich: Yeah, so he’s not a dick — he just gracefully removes himself from this world.
Cam: With Templeton, who’s just like the complete other extreme — who I think Maugham kind of said at some point, like, don’t get too on this guy’s back, like he has some redeeming qualities. He’s generous, but just totally —
Benny: Yeah, totally consumed by social status and signals and what it says about you, yeah.
Cam: Yeah, he’s a funny character. He’s quite a well-written character.
Rich: I like Elliot. I like all the characters. I don’t know if there’s something bad coming, or if he’s not very good at writing villains, but you kind of sympathise with everyone, right? Yeah, Elliot is obviously stuffy and a snob and so on, but he is a good guy, and he’s sort of entertaining, and he does right by people. There’s no one to root against so far. Isabel’s mom is really great — she’s got a very dry sense of humour. Isabel is fantastic. Gray is a nice guy — he’s not even jealous or mad or anything.
Benny: No, not at all. Yeah, so Larry’s best friend is in love with his girlfriend, but never — yeah, doesn’t seem to ever be an asshole to Larry or anything.
Cam: Was that, like, a known secret that everyone kind of knew?
Benny: Yeah, I think it was just an open secret.
Cam: Larry’s just so dignified. You’re a good guy.
Rich: I think this book is honestly, like, tailor-made for me to like it, because this thing that he does where he walks away from his comfortable life to travel the world and study and learn stuff is, like, exactly what I did — being frugal and being a minimalist and sort of being disparaging of chasing material possessions or material comforts. So I did the Larry exactly. It feels very flattering to my personal lifestyle choices, but actually in a way where there’s not enough conflict — it’s too patronising or something. Like, it would be more interesting — it gets more interesting once we can find something slightly mean to say about Larry, perhaps.
Benny: How old were you when you pulled a Larry?
Rich: I was 25. And exactly the same attitude. I’m going to loaf. Like, I’m going to fuck around, basically. I don’t have any firm intentions in mind. I just want to go and try a bunch of random stuff and read and learn and see what happens.
Benny: I love that line so much. I’m going to start using that when people ask me what I want to do in life. You know, just — yeah, I’ll always remember that, I think. “I’m trying — I’m loafing.”
The perils of stepping off the beaten path
Cam: But it’s interesting, because Isabel’s first reaction is, like, what the fuck? This guy’s up to fuck-all. I know people that are up to nothing, and it’s not very noble. But it’s funny when it gets matched with deep learning, or, I suppose, spiritual stuff — then it feels noble.
Benny: Did you catch, in the last few pages of part two when Isabel’s having the conversation with the author, the narrator talks about a friend that he knew back in his youth who gave up a good job and got obsessed with writing about some subject, and wrote, like, several tomes on this subject, but no one knew about them, you know — they didn’t sell, his family ended up becoming desperately poor, his daughter died of a disease, his wife left him — but he just got so obsessed with this one subject, he just had to keep writing and researching it. And I think he’s got an interesting line in there where he says —
Rich: So, like, “many are called but few are chosen,” or something?
Benny: Yeah, he says, “it’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called but few are chosen.” You know, so most people stay on the beaten track, which is also fine and good and probably better for most people, and then there are some people who feel compelled to leave it, but, you know, it doesn’t always go well. And so I don’t think it’s a totally overly optimistic story. We’ll still see what happens to Larry later on, right? It’s possible this takes a darker turn than what we’ve seen so far.
Cam: That part when he said he knew another guy who just got totally obsessed with knowledge and no one knew about him — it reminded me of, like, maybe I saw on Twitter or something, the affliction that hits guys like us who just get totally obsessed with learning, and it gets in the way of earning money. As Isabel complains, if Larry spent the effort he does on earning money, he’s got such great potential. I always look at myself — I sometimes wish I’d kind of optimised for money a bit more than I did. But I just can’t. It’s a thing I thought about with contracting — it’s just too much hustle, man. Just want a loaf.
Benny: Yeah, what’s nice about Larry too is his self-assuredness, which is rare for someone who’s that young, but he’s very confident in his decisions, and he also seems to know himself quite well. So okay, so —
Cam: Well, he’s trying to find himself, but he’s not insecure or anything. He’s not, like, hiding from anything. Well, he’s dealing with some trauma, but —
Benny: He’s trying to find himself, but he knows that about himself. My sense is there are lots of people who don’t know that they need to find themselves, right? They don’t know what they don’t know, in some sense. And he knows that he doesn’t know anything, and knows that he wants to figure something out and needs to go away until he tries to figure that thing out.
Cam: Well, I suppose actually heaps of guys probably want to do the Larry. I imagine this is the perfect book to read when you’re, like, 20 — it would be, like, super inspiring for a lot of people, and potentially instigate you to do the Larry. But, like, a lot of people would probably think, yeah, that would be great. And then it’s like, well, but I’m not going to actually do it.
Benny: Yeah.
Cam: And I suppose he’s very sure to actually do the Larry, right?
Larry the trust fund kid
Rich: There’s also a sort of sleight of hand here where it seems as if Larry is making this leap of faith, and it’s so impressive that he’s totally confident about it and not sort of anxious about whether it’s going to go wrong. But he is also a trust fund kid to some extent, which you kind of forget about, right? They keep saying, like, “oh, you can’t live on a pittance of three thousand a year.” I used the CPI calculator to find out what that is. It’s more than $50,000 US dollars per year. So it’s not nothing. He’s earning more than the median American individual salary to do nothing — to sit on his ass.
Benny: Wait, wait, wait. And is that inflation-adjusted?
Rich: That’s what I’m saying. In today’s money, it’s $54,000 US dollars.
Benny: I see, I see. Yeah, okay. Nice.
Rich: That’s how far three grand went back in…
Cam: What was the last year? Like, $30,000?
Rich: CPI numbers are fiddled, man. But anyway, like, you can afford to be — this is a common critique, I think, of people who take these kind of creative leaps and go off the beaten path, is that you can afford to be sort of confident and be always smiling about it if you are in fact earning more than, like, probably 98% of the world does for doing absolutely nothing through some kind of inheritance or trust fund or something. So it slightly takes the edge off his admirability for me.
Cam: Oh no, it’s definitely — and sometimes it instantiates itself in different ways, that there’s people who become a hippie or something, and it’s like, yeah, they’ve got, like, a house — like, inherited a house or some shit, which everyone else is saving for, and they don’t have to worry about it. And then it’s like, you can go and not pursue the rat race as well.
Rich: There’s no world where he can read William James 10 hours a day if he doesn’t have this sinecure, right? He’s actually going to have to be washing dishes or doing some horrible manual labour. And he does that later in the book, but that would be his entire life. It wouldn’t be that he’s studying all the time — that would be just merely so that he can pay rent.
Cam: But I think he acknowledged that at one point — like, in another life, he’d have to earn. And he’s able to do it, so this is what he wants to do.
Rich: No, totally. And, like, if I was in his shoes, I’d do the same thing, right? With the resources at one’s disposal, what should one do with oneself? Well, that seems like a pretty cool thing to do.
Cam: Yeah, if I had fuck-you money, I’d just loaf, right? Yeah.
Rich: It’s like proto early retirement.
Cam: It’s Mr Money Mustache early retirement and weird types of people. Because some people worry about it — what would you do? What do you mean? It’s like, well, just loaf, man. I’d read.
Rich: Just fucking go hard on William James.
Benny: What wouldn’t I do?
Cam: William James, yeah. I’d try to. I mean, I get distracted by chess.com and stuff. But although I do wonder, if you didn’t have any external motivation, it would be hard to keep doing that. Like, if you had a podcast or a newsletter or something, then you’re always learning. And I can imagine that would keep you going to spend all your day doing it.
Pursuit of knowledge vs building stuff
Rich: So I felt kind of attacked by Isabel’s complaint about, like, why are you learning all this stuff — it’s not noble if you’re not going to do anything with it. And I had this realisation, because I’ve been reading the autism book, and you know, just one point off the diagnosis, that you know how autistic people famously collect stuff — they love to catalogue the world, they want to know every single model of trains or doorknobs or whatever. And I never made the connection that I think that’s pretty much my relationship to knowledge — that I’m compelled to taxonomise the world, which is why I’ve been drawn to these knowledge management tools of creating, like, hierarchical and associative knowledge. And I’m collecting all the facts and I’m obsessed with everything being in the right place, and the relationships, like, resolving any ambiguities or conflicts in the relationships. And I just get off on that. And I think, in my head, oh, it’s because I’m going to use it to write interesting posts or books or whatever. But I’m never going to write about, like, quantum physics or whatever — that’s completely irrelevant to anything that I could conceivably do. But I still want to understand all the concepts and have it all mapped out neatly in my knowledge graph. And I think that maybe that is kind of a spergy trait. It’s not for anything — it’s purely intrinsic.
Cam: I definitely relate to that — it’s not really for anything. I’m not sure how much taxonomising you do, and maybe you are a bit spergy with it, but it helps you just build it for its own sake. So, one of my favourite taxonomies was Venkatesh Rao’s. He said there’s the manipulative model and the appreciative model. And you can both be high-IQ smart guys, and some of them will just totally maximise — you know, do their CFA and learn Excel and Python and all that, and just totally maximise their income. And then other guys will just be keen to learn stuff like Larry, for its own sake, rather than improving their life. And, I mean, everyone’s got a bit of both, I suppose. But we relate to Larry. And I assume the author relates to Larry heaps this way. There’s this love letter to this type of guy of just getting lost in knowledge. So when Isabel asks him, Maugham says, “some people have a disinterested desire for knowledge. It’s not an ignoble desire. Perhaps there will be sufficient satisfaction merely to know, or a step towards something further.” But yeah, we just have this compulsion just to know things. It’s kind of weird.
Benny: Wait, so Rich, do you feel attacked because you feel like you can’t justify knowledge for its own sake?
Rich: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think probably I don’t need to justify it, do I? So there’s nothing to really feel bad about. It’s just — yeah, but I’m not doing it as a status grab, so —
Cam: Well, it’s high status, also. It’s like, if you’re spending all your time learning, like, Warhammer or some shit, you know, people are like, “that guy’s wasting his time, he’s a loser, don’t date him.” They still might say that about, you know — I mean, they are saying that about Larry, but —
Rich: I’m not worried about that. The reason that you could feel bad about it is if it is, like, exactly the heart of Isabel’s complaint, which is that we’re building this new world out here, we are in this time of great opportunity, we need men to do hard work, so why — and also, you know, money is an imperfect but pretty good proxy for creating value in the world. So if you are earning money —
Cam: Capitalist scum.
Rich: There’s a very good chance that you’re actually, like, making some important contribution. And I think that is true of myself. I could definitely actually work more. I could theoretically be helping solve some important problem. So I guess that’s the insecurity I have around it — is that, like, I know that I have a high potential, and I know that I simply prefer to loaf because I find it fun. And, like, my incentive structure is fucked now because I don’t really need to work, so I don’t need to get a normal salary.
Cam: I sympathise — not with you not needing to work, but with this slight feeling of… I was going to say, “relate to what you’re saying.” Well, not the last part. But around this slight insecurity of — well, I think what Isabel was saying around — it is quite noble also to build stuff. There’s Marc Andreessen’s “why aren’t you”, like, “just build, baby, build” — like, building stuff’s awesome. And the person who just goes to get lost in, like, academia-land and learn stuff isn’t actually adding anything to society and feels better about themselves because they’re learning about art and the fine things. And, you know, what John Stuart Mill sort of said, why it’s better to be a man than, like, a pig in the mud — like, all the fine things. And then you’ve just got someone who’s building their business, and, like, actually that stuff’s really cool and probably better for society.
Benny: Yeah, of course.
Rich: So we’re reprising the Glass Bead Game criticism, right? Of, like, what’s the value of being a cloistered sect of Benedictine monks who are researching sort of arcane esoteric knowledge that’s not practically useful in the world.
Cam: I suppose I don’t mind — Larry doesn’t do this, but I don’t like it when someone has this attitude that they want to just learn things, and then they kind of view all just regular earning an income and raising a family — they kind of look down on that side of things.
Benny: Yeah, they just disparage regular jobs.
Cam: Yeah, they’re just like, “yeah, I don’t care about money, I don’t care about status.” And yeah, it goes too far — you can see it with Elliot. But in some sense, it’s good that people build stuff, right? It’s great.
Rich: And it’s much clearer now than it was in Maugham’s time, when people in his novel who are doing the wrong things are, like, socialites and stockbrokers and stuff — which, sure, probably they’re not making much of a net contribution. But it’s much clearer today, when any one of us could plausibly be working for a startup trying to solve an important problem.
Cam: Yes. Sometimes I envy people who get lost in their work — they’re, like, totally obsessed with their work, whether it’s a startup or something else, and they do really — and I’m just… I get obsessed with loafing and learning things, and I just couldn’t imagine that aligning with my work, really.
Benny: Yeah, I was thinking that too, Rich — like, in some sense the criticism hits harder now, because post-World War One the US was booming, and so in some sense Larry was highly replaceable. There were a lot of people around looking for jobs, looking to contribute. Everyone wanted to get in on the action — it was the Roaring Twenties, and so, you know, the economy was in some sense in no danger of a lot of people bowing out of it and not contributing. But now we’re potentially in this situation, depending on how much you buy great stagnation type arguments, that things are slowing down a bit, especially in some sectors. Perhaps this doesn’t hit home as hard now with all the AI stuff going wild. But in some sense you actually —
Rich: So [there are] constraint[s] that people [aren’t] having.
How to choose which problems to work on?
Benny: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of bureaucracy, and there’s possibly cultural arguments too — that people are sort of more pessimistic, and there’s social norms against making progress and stuff like this. But in some sense, people that just build stuff are more important now than they were in the 20s, because they’re sort of less replaceable now, I would say. But the other thing I wanted to say is — yeah, I think a good way that I’ve come to think about what you’re focusing on is not as an island, but as just part of this giant society of a bunch of people with different interests. And from that perspective, it seems quite clear that you want everyone doing sort of slightly different things. You want some people getting really excited about practical projects, writing code, you know, building machines, robotics, working in restaurants, like, doing whatever. And then you also want some people who are doing more theoretical stuff, more tentative research, studying poetry, art, etc. And this aligns well with humans, because all our interests are different. So ideally, everyone’s doing their interesting thing, and you get a decent match between everyone pursuing what’s interesting to them, and then what sort of needs to be done across the frontier of progress for society. And I think in some sense it’s silly to force yourself to do something that is uninteresting to you — modulo, if you have to work for money, etc, those sorts of constraints. But if you have the choice between doing something that’s uninteresting versus something that’s interesting, it seems silly to constrain yourself to doing something that’s uninteresting purely for the sake of you feel like, oh, this will be better for society. Because ideally that spot will be taken by someone who’s actually interested in that thing and will do it. And then that leaves room for you to do the thing that you’re actually interested in, which you stand a much better chance of actually making progress on in the long run, and then contributing something. I understand that it can be somewhat easy to criticise people doing things with no immediate impact, but you also need them for society to flourish, right? Because you do have these instances where they create new knowledge that we realise solves some problem in some totally unrelated domain. And then that pushes progress forward, right?
Rich: Yeah, no, I agree with that. The only thing that I want to push back on is, like, the most extreme version of that argument, which I’ve heard Vaden make before, for instance, which is something like, there’s no way of telling what problems are better or worse to work on, and everyone should just do what’s fun or what is interesting to them. I think that’s, like, straightforwardly wrong. And I’m not even sure — I shouldn’t litigate Vaden when he’s not here — but he might have been getting carried away when he said that. It was in the context of critiquing the fact that EA organisations exist. What he was saying — like, I think the example we used was something like, oh, my friend is interested in getting kids more interested in Dungeons and Dragons, and who’s to say that’s not a more useful problem to work on than the top five cause areas recommended by the Centre for Existential Risk. And I’m like, no, that’s — you’re wrong. Like, that’s fucking stupid. Those problems are just better to work on. So I only disagree with that kind of level of blind faith and, like, principle of fun, or whatever you want to call it, of thinking that we can never predict anything whatsoever about what might arise from the problems that we choose to focus on. But I agree, like — and in some sense, it’s almost like deterministic that, speaking personally, I’m just so bad at doing things that I don’t want to do, that it’s a moot point anyway. I just won’t do them. I can only work on things that are interesting to me. So that’s just how it’s going to be.
Cam: There’s a difference of, like, cutting edge new research in areas that don’t have an obvious payoff versus just, like, “I’m gonna go and read the classics and edify myself.” I mean, maybe — like, maybe you can provide new research into the classics, but it kind of — like, there’s a difference of some, like, math research, doing pure maths, and, like, me just trying to collect all the objects of knowledge out there and just purely for myself because I’m interested in it. In the same way of, like, “I want to watch all the movies, like, I need to watch all the classic movies.” It seems more similar to that, to be honest.
Rich: Yeah, like a self-indulgent kind of element to it.
Cam: Which I actually wanted to talk about. So we’ve kind of talked about responsibility to society and like building versus loafing, but there’s also this responsibility to family as well. So he’s got this potential wife that wants him to work, raise family, share needs. And I kind of viewed this a little bit of myself — there seems to be a selfish aspect to it. But I think he’s aware of it, and he just knows what he wants, and he’s honest about it. And he said, “this is me.”
Benny: At first I was going to defend him by saying, you know, they’re not married yet, they’re still quite young — if he was doing this at 30 instead of 20, or 19, or however old he is, then I take your point. But then I started thinking, you know what — like, he does clearly have this girl who wants to marry him. And they’re, you know, they’re in this serious relationship. She’s been waiting for him. She was waiting for him to get home throughout the war. Then he comes back. He’s quite different. And then he tells her he needs to move to France for some unknown amount of time.
Cam: “Give me a couple years.”
Rich: Yeah, and she’s like, “just tell me what you’re going to be doing over there.” And he’s like, “no.”
Benny: Which, yeah, is quite selfish. And so, yeah, honestly, I do take the point — it does seem almost childish in some sense.
Cam: And, like, that’s fine, like, people can do that, but it is quite a — it’s a selfish thing. And maybe selfish is the wrong word, but, like, it’s a “I’m doing this for me, and I’m sticking with it. I’m not going to apologise for it, because this is so important.” And it is important to him — this is important to him, to go read Descartes, then support his partner. And I struggle with that sometimes — even, like, normal things, like, you know, going to events and shit, like, you know, that Elliot wants to always go to. It’s like, “we’re going to go to Venice.” I’d rather just stay home and read. And it’s like, at some point you’ve got to compromise — go to the event, man.
Larry as mythic Siddhartha figure
Benny: Yeah. There’s also this — I mean, there’s maybe a bit of tension in just how he’s written it as well, that he’s painting Larry as living this highly idealised intellectual lifestyle that he seems quite content with. My sense is that in reality, most people actually need more social contact than that. And so it makes me a little suspicious that he is as happy as he perhaps comes across all the time, because I think most people would need more socialising. I mean, you know, he does have friends, and we don’t actually get that many details of his life in France. So perhaps we’re supposed to fill in the details that, yeah, of course he knows people, and maybe there’s people he goes out for coffee with and that sort of thing.
Cam: You’re a total 0.1% if you can literally just read all day, just you.
Rich: Yeah, this feels like a mythic figure, right? It’s almost some — it’s like a retelling of the Buddha, of Siddhartha going and sitting under the tree and reading, and being a man among the people, and giving away as well, right? Like, I find it hard to imagine Larry as a real person in the world. He’s more like some idealised form of a person.
Cam: Yeah, it’s like the platonic form, and all of us relate to it a bit because we’re, like, 20% of that or something. So, oh yeah — like, before I got my job after uni, I spent a summer going to —
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Cam: — library and, like —
Rich: I mean, let’s go concrete — like, how long can you guys read a tough sort of primary text on something?
Cam: Well, that’s the other thing I wanted to talk about as well. He’s reading primary text, and just — I don’t really —
Rich: I think William James is pretty readable, probably. I haven’t read him, but —
Cam: Yeah, William James is, I assume, a good writer because he’s brothers with Henry James. But who else did he read? Like, read Spinoza, read Descartes —
Rich: Yeah, it was going more, like, continental than analytical, right? Which is tough going.
Cam: I can’t remember, but it’s definitely —
Benny: Doing the Flemish mystics.
Cam: Primary sources. And that’s, like, very respected. And it made me wonder about — well, I did wonder —
Benny: He was learning Greek, right? Or something? Or Latin?
Cam: Yeah, to assume to learn — to read the playwrights and philosophers.
Sex as a brief respite from 10 hours of reading
Rich: I think I could get, like, maybe four or five hours a day, or possibly more if I spread it out nicely, of intellectual heavy lifting per day, which would be, like, reading a continental philosopher and understanding carefully enough to understand what they’re saying. For instance, there’s no way I could do it from morning till night, not moving from the same chair — unless he’s on fucking amphetamines or something, there’s no —
Cam: Well, yeah, I suppose if I didn’t have a job and you sort of treat it as a job — yeah. I couldn’t do, like, eight hours in a row.
Rich: I suppose it’s not unlike an academic’s life, right? You work pretty hard on intellectual topics all day long.
Benny: But you are allowed to context-switch, right? And so I think that’s an important part of it. If you’re allowed to put down one book, pick up another one, or put down the book and then take notes on it. I mean, taking notes on a book, for instance, is just a very different activity than actually reading the book. Or suppose you’re obsessed with some problem, you’re looking in the book for some reference to that problem, or for something specific, as opposed to trying to absorb the whole book. That’s easier to do in some sense, because you’re kind of skimming, and you’re trying to understand, “okay, does this argument relate to what I’m worried about?” It’s a different type of reading. And so in some sense, how long you can spend on something is dependent on — to be a dickish Popperian about the whole thing — is, like, your problem situation, as they would say, right? Like, whatever context you’re dealing with at that time, that determines how you’re going to read something. And, like, yeah, just sitting down point blank to read Plato’s Republic — you know, I’m going to get mentally exhausted after, you know, probably like an hour, but, you know, possibly a couple hours. But if you’re reading it because someone has claimed that he made a specific claim, and you’re trying to dig through the source material to find that claim, you know, you might be able to do that all day, just because it’s a different sort of activity.
Rich: Yeah, that’s fair.
Cam: Yeah, I kind of lasted a couple of hours at the library. I remember — actually, I’d almost finished university and I signed up for, like, Psych 101 or, like, 130, or something — this online course in the summer. It was awesome. You just had a little online test at the end of the week, and we just split it up with other guys, so we just did, like, one every three weeks, and we just did the test for everyone else. And I’d go to the library, but I’d usually last — you sort of get there, like, 10 or 11am, last a couple of hours, get a bit hungry, get a bit bored, head home. That was, like, your day.
Rich: Yeah. I think we have to think Larry is interacting with other Parisians, but they’re not the social set of named Parisians. So that’s why we don’t even find out who they are. He has friends maybe amongst the real bohemians or the real interesting artists or intellectuals.
Cam: Yeah. And he is maybe just a bit weird. At one point — was it the reason he didn’t lunch was to save time? Which reminded me of that Derek Parfit story. He’s just one of those 1%.
Rich: I wasn’t going to bring this up because I think it’s not in the first two chapters, but I had the exact same thought about Derek Parfit. There’s a scene where a woman comes to his room, he fucks her, she leaves, and he immediately picks up his book and resumes — like, no cuddles, no pillow talk. He’s like, “get the fuck out of here,” and he starts going back.
Cam: And it does the job. I suppose it does the job.
Rich: Yeah, two pumps and then he’s like, “right, I gotta get back into my Dorito.” It’s so funny. Yeah, I had the exact same vision of, like, Derek Parfit, you know, reading philosophy while he’s putting his socks on, or, like, pedalling his exercycle, or whatever. He’s like, “I cannot waste a moment.” Or, like, you’re lying there and you’re, like, making her ride you in cowgirl, and you’re, like, holding your book up.
Cam: Derek Parfit’s at least red on the side of the bed.
Rich: It’s so disrespectful, man — like, don’t take yourself so seriously, you can take five minutes off.
Cam: It’s funny, with, like, stimulus and podcast culture and stuff now — we’re always listening to podcasts and shit. The time is often, like, in the shower — you go to the shower. I don’t get it so much anymore because I try to be mindful of it, but I used to be, like, “you’re not doing anything — could be maximising, panic that this could be podcast time.”
Rich: What’s the minimum interval of time that you guys will, like, track down your earbuds for to listen to a podcast? Because mine is literally, like, three minutes. If I need to put away the dishwasher, I’ll listen to three minutes of a podcast rather than just do it and then go back to what I’m meant to be doing.
Cam: Yeah, I’d spend three minutes looking for the motherfucking AirPods at the bottom of my bed.
Rich: Yeah, yeah, and then they won’t connect properly to your iPhone, you’re like —
Cam: And then find them, and then put them on charge and wait two minutes, and then put them in, and then do the dishes.
Rich: What? Fuck you, Tim Apple.
Cam: So, primary sources — yay or nay?
Rich: I might have to do a quick pee break. Sorry, fellas. I’ve been hydrating —
Cam: So, intermission?
Rich: — way too good.
Benny: Yeah, let’s go. I’ll put some freaking sleepy time tea on, get nice and ready for bed.
Rich: I can still hear you.
Cam: Get another Coke.
Maugham’s style and Herman Hesse comparison
Rich: You guys got any comments on the style of the book? The writing style? Like, any sort of meta comments?
Cam: In terms of style, I think it’s the style — I quite like to bring it back to the Virginia Woolf discussion, where the modernists happened in the 20s as a reaction to just that kind of realism, plain style. But then a little bit later, a decade or two later, you had Orwell and Graham Greene, or whatever his name is. And it’s that more kind of plain English style, and this more seems to be —
Rich: Exceptionally plain.
Cam: — in that genre, which —
Rich: Do you think this is the easiest book that we’ve read so far?
Benny: In terms of prose style?
Rich: Prose style, vocabulary, plot structure.
Benny: Yeah, I think so.
Cam: Yeah, I think it’s the most straightforward.
Rich: It’s not didactic, but it hasn’t made me, like, think at all really. It’s just very straightforward.
Cam: I don’t understand — it hasn’t made you think at all? Because we’ve talked quite a lot about Larry as a —
Rich: No, no, yeah, I don’t know what I mean by that.
Benny: Do you mean ponder what’s actually happened on the page, you mean?
Rich: Yeah, I haven’t had to stop and be like, “what does he mean by this?” Or, like, “what is the deep theme here?” or whatever. Like, it’s all fairly surface level. It is interesting.
Cam: I mean, Stoner was a little bit like that.
Rich: It’s just like — Stoner was like that for sure.
Cam: I mean, this has some similarities to Stoner, with a slightly different life track instead of being an academic. But spiritually a similar sort of guy, perhaps.
Rich: Yeah, do we think there’s going to be some conflict? There needs to be something to shake things up, otherwise I might be a little disappointed. I’m enjoying it for sure, but I need something bad to happen. I need Larry to show some teeth, or maybe make a wrong decision or something.
Cam: Yeah, I will say, I mean, my guess is it’s going to be like, yeah, author insert.
Rich: Third act murder mystery.
Cam: That was the harbinger of it.
Benny: What do you think the razor’s edge means at this point in the book?
Cam: Well, I think it’s named after — it said it when you wiki it — a verse in the Katha Upanishad, which is, like, Eastern philosophy. “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over. Thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.” So, yeah, maybe he’s going to become a mystic, like Glass Bead Game style.
Benny: Well, that Van Ruysbroeck that he brought up to Isabel, and then she misremembered the name but the narrator picked it up — he was a mystic.
Cam: This man — every white man in the 20th century is looking for the meaning of life.
Rich: Is this roughly contemporaneous with Glass Bead Game? Well, that was a bit later, wasn’t it?
Benny: Yeah. This was ‘44. I forget when Glass Bead Game was. Oh, Glass Bead Game was definitely, like, 80s or something, because we were talking about Popper in relation to Glass Bead Game and how —
Cam: No, it was published in 1943.
Rich: Oh, ‘43 — so these are almost exactly contemporaneous.
Benny: Glass Bead Game? Really?
Cam: Yeah. It’s, like, a pre-World War Two novel.
Rich: So it must be that the great world spirit is settled on these particular themes. So there’s definitely strong Hinduism and hearsay elements in here. I wonder if one even influenced the other.
Cam: I suppose it kind of makes sense, right? It’s like, you want to get meaning, and you get meaning and knowledge and you read all the Western literature, and then you start seeking the Eastern stuff. And the Eastern stuff’s being kind of by osmosis filtered through, like, Western stuff, like, these days for us. But it would have been real fresh back then, I suppose. I mean, these guys are examples — like, we read Hesse and Maugham and Wallace and stuff, and they’re all kind of influenced by Buddhism.
Predictions for how Larry’s journey plays out
Rich: So what do we predict the ending will be? Will it be like Larry is full mystic and he’s found inner peace and he’s found meaning in life? Or will it be, like, that’s a dead end as well, and he has to return to normal society? Like, is there going to be some synthesis, or is it going to be some kind of hippie ending — or third act murder mystery, which I’m rooting for, but I feel is probably not going to happen?
Cam: I think it’s going to be, like, unresolved. Like, he’s going to be — but, like, there’s going to be no answer to “the life”, and potentially Isabel will also be content as well, like, and Gray. Like, a different life path is maybe also fine.
Benny: Yeah, if I had to put money on it, I would say it’s going to be some synthesis — in the sense that perhaps he’ll realise, like, the happiest people are the sort of Isabels of the world. Because she actually seems quite content, and she knows what kind of person she is, she wants to lead a specific lifestyle, she’s going to lead that specific lifestyle, and doesn’t want anything outside of that, really.
Cam: Yeah, Isabel seems cool, to be honest.
Benny: Yeah, she also knows herself quite well. Like, I’m impressed by —
Cam: Yeah, she’s mature for a 19-year-old.
Benny: Yeah, the maturity of all these characters. And my sense is that this probably actually was just more common back in the day, when people had to grow up a little faster, and probably just reached psychological maturity faster, I think.
Cam: Yeah, our 20s are extended adolescence now.
Benny: Yeah, absolutely. I think there is, like, some arrested development going on, and possibly that’s a good thing, right? Possibly you want to give people even longer to make mistakes and sort themselves out. I don’t know. But I think that was a real phenomenon, especially for the men who were going off to war, seeing some crazy shit and then coming back as 19 and 20 year olds. But yeah, that would be my — if I had to put money on it, that would be my guess. Some sort of synthesis, between realising that you don’t need to perhaps sort out all these answers for yourself, you don’t need to, like, find God or know God or any of these kinds of things, and, you know, it’s possible to live a happy life just in the absence of such knowledge.
Cam: All right, lads.
Rich: Cool. Should we wrap it up?
Cam: Yeah, man.
Benny: Yeah, nice. That was good.
