Discussing chapters 4 and 5 of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
Larry becomes aloof and reserved. Is he really bringing anything to the table besides his sexy forearms? Has he gone full woo-woo granola cruncher? Why can Kosti only talk about spirituality when he’s drunk? Why aren’t muses a thing these days?
Synopsis
Rich: Right, should we talk about the book? I reckon we cover part three and four.
Cam: Let’s do it, Rich. Do you want to give one of your brief summaries?
Rich: I’d love to. Here’s one I prepared earlier. After two years of intellectual labours, Larry goes to work in a coal mine where he meets Kosti, a Polish nobleman in exile. The pair go rambling through Western Europe, ultimately staying on at a farm in Germany to work over the summer. Meanwhile, Isabel and Gray are married. It’s the Roaring Twenties in full swing. Elliot makes a packet on the stock market and buys a place on the Riviera, starts entertaining in grand style. Then eventually we get the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, which spares Elliot, who has converted his stock into gold, but ruins Gray and his father and plunges Europe and America into the Great Depression.
Elliot installs Henry and Isabel in his apartment in Paris, and the whole gang gets reconciled with Larry after about ten years. Larry initially looked like a bum. He spent five years in India, including a couple of years studying under a guru in an ashram. Larry cures Gray’s migraines. We meet Suzanne, the artist and professional mistress, who recounts the story of how Larry saved her when she was at her lowest point. And I think that’s where we end up. That’s the meat of it, if we’re not going to do part five.
Cam: Yeah. I think the only thing you missed is he kind of healed the headache.
Rich: No, I actually did say that, didn’t I?
Cam: Oh, didn’t you? Yeah.
Rich: That was the last time. Fair enough.
Benny: I tuned out for those.
Rich: You were staring at your face in the Zoom.
Benny: Yeah, yeah. Got to figure out how to get it back. God, I look good.
Cam: Did you say that? I think I also missed that. Maybe I didn’t. Sorry. EQ is great. Terrible migraines. Using some kind of oriental trick. Richard jumps in for another thirty seconds. Explain the migraines.
Rich: I’ll just do the synopsis again.
Cam: Yeah. What do you guys want to talk about this time? I mean, I’d be keen in general to talk about Larry’s aloofness to his friends and family in some sense, right? So I think we were introduced originally to this young man who’s obviously searching for knowledge and — to not be sort of grandiose about it — something like the meaning of life, right? He’s obviously discontent with sort of just living by the status quo and being an American, getting a job and doing the things that are expected of him. So he goes in search of knowledge and does all this stuff. And I think that was really attractive to me in particular, but to all three of us. And I think you feel identified with him to some extent.
But then as the book goes on, he’s getting older, he continues to travel. You get the sense that while you’re with him in person, yes, he’s sort of delightful to be around. He’s all smiles. He’s very charming. But he has chosen to live this sort of life where he’s constantly on the move. He’s unreliable in the sense that he could disappear out of your life at any moment. And everyone sort of knows that, right? I think Isabel describes it as trying to catch smoke with your hands, right? So yeah, it’s nice when he’s around, but he randomly shows up, he randomly leaves. It still feels like he hasn’t perhaps found what he’s looking for — at least maybe not, that’s not the right thing to say, but he’s just wedded to this life where he’s constantly moving, constantly searching.
I think that can be fine, but you start to see an element of selfishness in it as the book goes on, right? Because he’s got all these people that care about him in France and around the world, and they would like to see him. They would like to spend more time with him. And he sort of makes that impossible. And also, it seems like his life experiences have now diverged to such an extent with other people who are used to sort of a more normal existence that he has a bit of a hard time relating to them, right? Like I think Maugham is the — Maugham?
Rich: Maugham is the narrator.
Cam: Maugham is the narrator. Yeah. And I think Isabel at some point just sort of stresses that, while he’s nice to be around, there’s just a bit of an emotional gap perhaps is the right way to describe it between him and whoever he’s talking to.
So yeah, I’m just curious what you got. Like I’m a little less perhaps impressed by Larry. I think when the first and second part of the book ended, I sort of wanted to be Larry. He’s my idol. He’s just reading all the time. He’s forsaken various societal norms to actually pursue what he thinks is very valuable. And now the fact that he’s continued to do that as an older — not that he’s old yet, right? I think he’s early thirties at this point in the book, or at least when they sort of reunite with him.
Rich: He’s our age roughly, which is nice to sort of put it in.
Cam: Yeah, exactly. Twenty-seven.
Benny: You guys are old as fuck.
Rich: I still got time.
Benny: Thanks, man.
What do we think of Larry now?
Cam: I guess that’s just a long-winded way of asking, what are your thoughts of Larry now after these last two parts?
Benny: I totally agree. I think it’s always kind of been — there’s this tension between him doing something fairly noble, fairly appealing for people like us, and hard to do. So brave, and just difficult to keep going. But then — and, you know, a lot of that’s quite redeeming. Depending what it is, like if you just go bum around, it’s obviously not redeeming. But like, since he’s reading Descartes, it kind of is. Getting into the Eastern spiritual side can be redeeming. Becomes too woo, which, I mean —
Cam: Wait, are we parting ways with Larry because he goes from the Western tradition to the Eastern tradition?
Benny: No, no, no, no, no, I was saying like, getting into the Eastern tradition is good. But, I mean, Larry kind of did what Sam Harris did in his twenties, right? And Sam Harris had some fucking money, like trust fund. His mom created Golden Girls. He just went for ten years to the East and learned it all. And he probably — it’s probably the most important thing he ever did, even for his career to this day. But there’s a risk of people going to woo, right? And I think Maugham — I mean, we’ll talk about later — Maugham probably is sympathetic to some levels of woo that I probably get off earlier, like curing headaches and shit. So like, I suppose I’m just saying like, depending what you’re doing, it can be quite redeeming. What Larry’s doing is very redeeming. But even that, there’s this tension between obligations to — I mean, he doesn’t have kids and a wife, but I mean, he’s essentially left a wife, got family and just friends, and just all the kind of the boring steady stuff, which is also redeeming if you do that well and you can get a lot out of. As we kind of talked to the difference between sort of building and loafing, I mean, I relate to Larry. Like all I kind of want to do is read and learn stuff. And it’s a problem in my personal development life that I don’t want to redirect it to building stuff. I just would rather read. Even — I mean, I’m on the work clock at the moment, right?
Rich: Don’t admit it. Cut it out.
Benny: Yes.
Rich: I mean — yeah, one thing to emphasise maybe is that he’s still a very caring person, right? And we see that in his interactions with Suzanne when she’s down on her luck and he invites her and her kid — they have nowhere else to go — to come basically spend the summer or whatever it was with him in some home, and he pays for them, pays for their food, and when he leaves gives her a bunch of money so she can get back on her feet. So it’s not as if he’s an uncaring person, but he does refuse to have sort of long-standing relationships. He refuses to be part of a community for a significant amount of time.
Cam: Yeah, it’s hard to — there’s an element of selfishness there, I think.
Benny: And it’s also kind of brave sometimes to know you’re kind of shirking the social responsibility or the social etiquette in a kind of micro short-term sense and just be like, oh no, I walk home by myself rather than with the group. And you go do that and everyone’s kind of like, oh, like what the fuck. And you just go do it. You’re comfortable in yourself and it’s important enough. And like, there’s an element of selfishness — like I’d rather just walk home by myself than make small talk with this person or whatever it is. But there’s also this kind of bravery of like, yeah, I’ll willingly be the weird guy.
Rich: Yeah. I still think the Larry that’s being described to us is pretty hard to imagine as a real person if it wasn’t on the page. Everyone loves Larry, still loves Larry, even though they have some slight reservations about him. But he is disinterested and aloof and they all know it. He’s described as he never says anything witty or interesting in conversation. He’s not bringing any like emotional warmth or closeness. So I’m kind of wondering, what is this magical element that he’s supposedly bringing to the group dynamic?
Now I was thinking also where I part ways with him is — so he goes on this big journey of discovery. For me, I’d be so excited to talk about what I’ve learned and sort of bandy ideas around and maybe like share anything that could be useful to other people in particular — not necessarily to evangelise, but just to like be seen by them and see, you know, see if they can relate somewhat. But he’s the most obtuse motherfucker, in kind of a way that I find really annoying, where they’re like, oh my god, you were in India for five years, what did you do? And he’s like, oh, you know, this and that. Like some incredibly annoying like deflecting response where he won’t volunteer anything. And then they dig deep enough, he eventually talks a little bit about the ashram and stuff. But he’s so secretive — I think it strains a little bit how we’re supposed to still see him as this beautiful golden boy who’s such a pleasure to be around, when he’s like very — not cold, but like it seems like he is cold in every way. But they accept that. The author claims he isn’t, so it must be to do with this like physical body language or something, which is kind of a cheat when it’s a book to defend a little bit. Like, and he’s hot as fuck, you know, those golden forearms and —
Cam: Yeah, I forget — was that in part five? Or is that the golden — point Isabel loses her mind over?
Rich: Isabel’s like, give me a cigarette, I need a cylindrical object in my mouth stat. With her broke husband and two young kids.
Cam: That’s about the guy that got away.
Rich: I think she’s described as like a bitch in heat or something. Crazy, man. I wish my forearms had that power over women.
Benny: I know. And I’ve got not bad forearms, you know.
Cam: I bet you Benny’s got nice forearms. Climber forearms.
Benny: Can we get a little glimpse? Huge. Oh yeah, vascular. Yeah, I honestly — I actually can’t see anything is the issue.
Rich: I don’t know if you can even see them. You just gotta get — you gotta get given the back shot.
Benny: To defend Larry, like not talking about his trips a little bit — it kind of depends what he’s doing. He goes somewhere and just like reads Descartes for a week, let’s say. Even now this is a useful example. It’s been like Easter for four days. You get back to work, everyone asks what you did. I didn’t go anywhere. But there’s all these like socially acceptable things to talk about. You’re like, oh, I went to this place and it was sort of lovely. No, it was great. But like, what if you just literally spent like the last four days reading some like dense — you know, it’s in Daycare the last four days. And like, for I was talking to you guys, I was talking to the LessWrong people I met, you know, they’d love it. Anyway, this is what — these are the things I learned from this interesting blog or book. But just with normies, you’re kind of like, woah. And Larry doesn’t feel like he’s better than them either. He’s just like, oh — like he’s just not going to talk about it.
Cam: Okay, but he went to fucking India. He went to strange lands and had crazy experiences.
Rich: But he was doing something that’s interesting to anyone.
Benny: Yeah, I suppose part of him — it’s hard to relate to people as well. It would be hard to demonstrate what he got from it if you haven’t done the last like five years like milking a goat with a — and then Margie or something. But —
Rich: Don’t you think it’s patronising to be like — it’s kind of like newly people or something and they’re like, you wouldn’t understand, so I’m not even going to bother to try and give you the slightest morsel or something. Like, it’s pretty annoying I think. To be like, yeah, to just immediately assume that people couldn’t possibly be interested.
Cam: We’re not trying to connect with people. I think it’s like, these are your good friends who you haven’t seen in ten years. They’re so excited to see you and hear what you’ve been up to. And you’re just like — you’re deliberately being obtuse about the very thing that you know would give them pleasure, which is to like care about who you are and what you’ve been doing. And it feels like a super evasive kind of stinginess or something. Refusing to share your — about your journey that you’re on.
Benny: Yeah, I agree. It’s like not taking their friendship seriously in some sense.
Rich: Does he refuse not to share?
Cam: Well, he doesn’t in the end, but only under the onslaught of their questions, right? And even then, like with when he cures Gray’s headache and they want to talk to him about it, he just like refuses to talk about it and wants to shut down the conversation and pretend that it didn’t happen.
Curing Gray’s headache
Benny: Yeah. So just because we’re on the headache so — yeah, let’s talk about that. So Gray doesn’t want to meet them because he’s got this as well as husband, and because he’s got the serene headache. And then they go and check him out and Larry does, you know, the rain dance or something and cures it. And everyone’s like, oh my god, wow. And then he sort of talks about it — it was actually you, Gray, they cured it, like the way you think about it. My initial take was like, the author himself is sympathetic to Eastern mysticism and kind of thinks you can probably fix things like this with this style of thing. And like maybe just limited — headaches maybe — your headaches are hugely psychosomatic. So they’re quite important to note where these particular headaches came from. They’re brought on by stress from losing his brokerage and all of his money and his client’s money. So they are — like, I’m sure, I mean, you know all — yeah, no, it’s important. All these kind of things are difficult to track the causality of, but these are like especially likely to be in some sense psychosomatic or like have a psychological route to them. Yeah. So I sound a bit like sort of new atheistic kind of scientistic, or scientism sort of like — don’t do the Eastern medicine, like that doesn’t work. But part of me is thinking, like, yeah, like not sure that would have worked. Or if it did, like — and maybe that’s the point. It’s just it can be kind of placebo-esque. But like we’ll see how impressive the feats get. Like it’s almost — I wouldn’t be surprised if the author and Larry thinks they can cure cancer. And like I met people that have gone to meet some guru in a fucking cave who thinks they can cure cancer and these people believe this guy. It’s like —
Cam: Yeah, I’m sort of withholding judgement on that part of the book to be honest. I’m not entirely sure — we’ll see where it goes — what to make of it yet. Yeah, like, is Maugham actually endorsing these sort of techniques? Is it just because Gray is super stressed and Larry at bottom, what he’s doing is just, you know, some sort of mindfulness practice and Gray’s becoming less stressed? Or, you know, is there something actually magical or something going on?
Rich: This is all plausible though, right? He’s hypnotising him. We know that the root cause of the problem is psychological. It doesn’t seem like it needs to be supernatural. I didn’t think of it like that at all, but yeah, if he starts performing a bunch of miracles, then that’ll definitely recast that event for me. But I was just reading it as like a kind of the useful valid kind of Eastern mysticism — because he’s been — which is the other, you know, big secular ritual that people have taken from the Eastern side of things that is like validated today, or at least people seem to think that it is. And just suggestibility of the mind and so on.
Christian mysticism as thinly veiled Buddhism
Benny: So speaking of combining religions — when Larry was travelling with Kosti doing manual labour, and Kosti turns out to be quite smart, but also quite reticent around how smart he is, and he read a bunch of Christian mystics. And I just kind of Googled some of those names. So one of them is Meister Eckhart, who I think is a 1200s Christian. He’s pretty obscure and he was kind of known as a heretic at the time, kind of rediscovered five hundred years later. And he seems quite like almost the same teaching as Buddhism or Hinduism — of this kind of like universe is one sort of thing, like consciousness is everything. And it turned out Schopenhauer actually read this guy. And Schopenhauer was really influenced by — started getting really influenced by Eastern stuff. Even just said that this Meister Eckhart guy is like the same as Buddhism. He said the only difference is Meister Eckhart has to dress the shit up in Christianity and kind of like sanitises it a little bit. And so Schopenhauer read — what was it called? The Upanishads. I won’t be able to say it. Yeah, which is like the founding Hinduism stuff, which the quote Razor’s Edge comes from. And he just said, like, that changed his life. And then he saw Eckhart in that. Anyway, so — and then I kind of looked at the other two names, and the one’s Plotinus who’s famous for Neoplatonism, and I think this sort of thing was there as well.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. So there’s a guy called Plotinus who’s a Platonist.
Benny: Yeah, the Neoplatonist.
Cam: It’s like coming up with his name — Pluto. Pluto the dog.
Rich: You can see a discernible thread.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: It’s a direct through line.
Benny: Yeah. So what am I saying? It’s just kind of interesting that you had these old Christians that were probably independently saying similar things that didn’t have as much influence as the founders of Buddhism and Hinduism, obviously. But then also just for people like Maugham and Larry, getting into the sort of window into it, you can kind of reconcile with some of these other thinkers and understand it through that lens. It’s kind of different for our generation because we kind of grew up when — secularism was kind of picking and choosing and being syncretic about the Eastern traditions. A lot of it’s part of the water, right? With mindfulness and other things. And I think Maugham — and I think we’ve mentioned last time — very similar to Hermann Hesse, of just kind of seeing there’s a lot of interesting stuff there in the East and stuff. And it kind of was — it was before like the beatnik generation, you know, the Malachi poem. And they kind of got into it as well. In a way, it was a bit — I probably think it’s the wrong word — they were kind of early to realise that there’s a lot of good stuff here.
What does Kosti’s character represent?
Cam: Yeah, nice. What do we make of Kosti, by the way? He’s an interesting character. Like, what’s he representative of in Larry’s life? What does he represent in the book? Did he influence Larry in any way, or did Larry just find him to be an interesting and adequate travel companion?
Benny: I mainly just took it as it was like a kind of like a buddy film almost. It reminded me of Of Mice and Men and stuff like that. You’re just going around labouring. And labour itself, like the hard work being itself quite a way to enlightenment and potentially redeeming. Other than that, I didn’t take — yeah, I mean, you go, Rich.
Rich: No, I don’t have that much to say. I really liked that part of the book. I enjoyed the character of Kosti and it was kind of like, yeah, you can imagine them visually would make quite a pair, right? They described — the way that Kosti is described as like this great white slug. When he’s got his shirt off, he’s like — his fists are like anvil hammers or something. And he just gets drunk and starts spouting mysticism. And then when you ask him about it in the morning, he’s like, shut the fuck up, like I said nothing.
Cam: Yeah, well, I mean, what do we think that was about? That’s such an interesting characteristic. What do we know? Like, he’s a nobleman who is in exile.
Rich: A former nobleman, yeah. He’s fallen from great heights. He’s very well educated, but doing manual labour.
Cam: The contrast with Larry is that Larry is there of his own volition and he’s not resentful of his position at all. He’s like seeking it out intentionally. Whereas Kosti is there presumably because that’s just what life is like for him now. But he’s been thrust into that situation. I guess he’s mad about it.
Rich: Yeah. There was a funny detail that he only reads the newspaper and detective stories. But he’s obviously this smart guy and his wisdom comes out like late at night sometimes. But yeah, maybe it’s that he feels constrained — and he says like, or he’s kind of moved on from that stuff. And he’s like, fuck all that stuff, I just want to read like an old pulp detective novel now and do my job.
Benny: You can’t help relapsing at night.
Rich: Yeah. That’s cope, right? He’s like, I read that book when I was twelve, it sucks or something. That’s what he says to Larry the first time he meets him.
Cam: Yeah. Okay. So maybe one way to think about him as — so Elliot, in some sense, is a foil to Larry, right? Cares about a completely different set of values than Larry does. But I think Kosti also is Larry’s foil in the sense that he explored this intellectual life in his life.
Rich: Yeah, and now has totally rejected it and is put in this life not out of choice and is now trying to reject all his earlier learnings.
Benny: Perspective human nature — like when you’ve done that, you’ve like done that journey, and then you see someone doing it, you’re a little bit, you feel above it or you’re a little bit dismissive of it. You’re like — and it’s almost like that Good Will Hunting scene, like, you know, when there’s that guy in the pretentious kind of bar trying to dunk on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon comes in. It’s like, gonna read Friedman now and you’re gonna read it, you know. And you kind of know it all, and —
Rich: You might be right.
Benny: Yeah, and you might be right as well. But there’s kind of an ugliness that can come out of it. Like, and I see it as well in people that maybe just getting into some quite accessible public intellectual that maybe I got into a while ago, and whether it’s David Deutsch that we got into now or like the new atheist phase or some culture war thing. And you kind of see them and you can be quite down on it because it’s all so predictable what they’re into. So maybe there’s a little bit of that, which I think is kind of the natural part of human nature. But it’s interesting as a foil because like what he’s — he’s just doing labour as well, which — it’s not about his choice. But it’d be different if he kind of went through the kind of the phase quotes and then have this kind of more impressive job or like steady family, which he’s getting a lot of meaning and joy from. But he doesn’t seem to be getting that either, because I think that would be probably a true foil — someone who’s getting some of the stuff that Larry’s deriving, some of the meaning, as well as some of the meaning that Larry’s not.
Rich: Yeah, he’s a drunk, right? He doesn’t really have pleasures in life, but he drinks pretty hard and likes to cheat at cards. I mean, maybe he’s just that. Yeah, the Poles in literature always cheat at cards.
Benny: Maybe he’s just this interesting guy you meet when you go and mix it with different types of activities, who’s like this strong kind of religious, kind of not — a guy who’s a bit wise and that you can learn from. Kind of like the Infinite Jest quote that you can learn from all types of people, even people you sort of look down on or are different to you. That’s very banal and cliché. But you know when you talk to people that have a lot of stories, that have done a lot of travelling, and there’s always these interesting guys or girls that they run into — and maybe it’s just that. It’s just meant to represent that. It’s like some old Polish guy who is kind of interesting.
Cam: I think it has something to do with his being cynical, preventing him from accessing the whatever actual interesting truths he has stumbled across, right? And so they only come out when he’s drunk and feels totally unselfconscious to talk about it. But he’s so hardened and cynical that he can’t just be real the rest of the time. I think maybe that’s meant to be the trap that he is in. That assumes that the Christian mysticism is actually something that’s worth following or engaging in. It seems like it potentially caused Larry to get into the Eastern stuff. Kosti talking about these thinkers, Meister Eckhart, and then Larry maybe checking those out and then realising there’s a lot of wisdom in the Eastern tradition. Yeah, I think it would be cool to like note down every name of an actual source or author or letter or whatever that’s mentioned and try and trace Larry’s intellectual journey. Just because unfortunately for me, like I don’t really know any of these references, just about. There’s like very few names that I recognise. So I don’t know.
Rich: William James is a very famous psychologist.
Cam: Yeah, that’s where I got off the train.
Rich: Page ten, principles of psychology.
Benny: But yeah, if this was like a bigger, better book, you’d have nerds kind of doing that, I suppose.
Cam: That’s our job.
Rich: Yeah, yeah. I got one thing that I’ll mention now, which is — so Suzanne recounts that while she was with him, he would make her read the parts and plays and stuff. And she said that she was sort of being self-deprecating about her own education and she’s mentioning that he was reading highfalutin people like the Duchess of blah blah blah and Henri Saint-Simon. And Saint-Simon is interesting I think and kind of relevant. So he’s like an early inspiration for Marx and various other economic thinkers who are basically just conceiving of class structures and the economy as something that you can address with science or with like cyclical type narratives, you know, Hegelian type —
Benny: He’s the first.
Cam: Yeah, he’s in a history, exactly. Yeah.
Rich: Yeah. But anyway —
Benny: Wait, sorry, what’s the name? Henry Saint-Simon?
Rich: Henri with an I. I guess he’s French.
Benny: Oh, Henri Saint-Simon. Okay. Anyway, sorry, yeah.
Rich: And so I think his — I mean, I don’t know much about him — his philosophy seems to be government should more or less get out of the way and let things happen, except the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class is the idling class, which is a terror of society, including able-bodied persons who instead of using their labour to benefit the social and economic order, prefer a parasitic life of work avoidance. That was kind of a funny thing. So I wonder if — you know, like, as in Larry is engaging with perhaps his critics as well. Or, that is interesting.
Why we can take Larry more seriously than the typical hippie
Benny: Yeah, nice. Yeah, he’s not just drinking the Kool-Aid. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. To me — so I keep thinking of when I hear stories of pulling the Larry. It’s always — it’s just that hard to identify and hard balance to strike when you’re doing it of like, how much of the Kool-Aid are you drinking and how sort of redeeming it is. And I think in terms of the intellectual journey, it does kind of matter that like he got really into some of the best of the Western tradition as well. Like, there’s value there and you can potentially talk sensibly about that. And you’re like, when you’re chimping out about society or about the meaning of life, like you want to be wise and non-ignorant. And someone who totally rejects all this — like, to take them seriously they need to be making sensible points. And rejecting, totally rejecting like the Western canon or things like that, is not a very reliable indicator of likely going to be sensible.
Rich: Yeah, they need to come like coming from a materialist background, right?
Cam: Yeah, is this critique geared at Cam?
Benny: No, it was more like back to — I’m not sure if we ever talked about it, but just like whether Larry is like a role model or like what he’s doing is — or like just when you run into someone who’s like Larry, if they’re talking about Eastern ideas, you can take them more seriously if you know they’ve actually engaged seriously with like Western materialism.
Cam: I see, I see.
Benny: Yeah. And even just like — I suppose I’m saying my bias is just towards deeply reading and studying. That might also include meditation. It’s just it’s easy to get into stuff when you want to reject. Like, even — do you guys see the blonde girl who’s like rapping and she’s got tattoos and like naughty hair and like dresses up all green? You guys seen that gone viral?
Rich: No.
Benny: Oh, just just me. But it is — it’s like, and she’s like deeply reading on Twitter. But like, she goes to South America, drinks some ayahuasca and like just totally has lost her mind. And there’s a risk for like turbo normies to like go do that. And I was dealing with some pretty heavy shit there. And she’d be like, yeah, I just need to get in touch with my something — not really realising what they’re doing. And she was just an idiot, right? So I suppose what I’m saying is someone goes and does all that and then they’re just an idiot. So the reason I like Larry is because he doesn’t seem like an idiot. And he seems potentially wise and well-read, not just someone who doesn’t wash and lives in the jungle, right? Like some Westerner, and to extract the meaning, the value from like rejecting a normal life. Yeah, I kind of expect that from someone. I don’t know if what I’m saying is making any sense, to be honest.
Rich: Yeah, the brunt of it makes sense, I think. The summary was good.
Cam: Just really —
Benny: You should check out that blonde girl, man.
Rich: I check out — I check out a lot of blonde girls. That’s the ultimate question of would or would not. What should I Google to find this girl? Blonde girl green and green?
Cam: What did you say? It’s not very specific. Blonde girl green tattoos.
Rich: Did you say she’s a rapper?
Benny: No, yeah, yeah, she’s making music. She’s making like bank on SoundCloud or OnlyFans or both. She’s just — she believes in aliens. But you see old photos of her, she’s really normal. I don’t know her name. I just saw her on Twitter.
Rich: Saint-Simon tried to commit suicide. He shot himself six times in the head.
Benny: What?
Rich: And only lost sight in one eye.
Benny: What the hell was he shooting himself? Stop believing I got in, man. Fucking pellet gun?
Cam: That’s like some fifty cent shit. That’s unbelievable. This guy’s got the worst aim in the head. Come on. But he shot himself in the head six times. So, unreal.
Rich: I think that’s attention-seeking behaviour.
Benny: Wow. That’s a cry for help. I can’t find the girl, because I think I was too embarrassed of liking —
Rich: Just check your Twitter bookmarks.
Benny: I know, so I’m literally done running. But it doesn’t look like it. Cut that bit out, Rush.
This book would hit way harder at age 18 or 20
Cam: Okay, so do you guys think if you read this when you were eighteen or twenty, you would have viewed it differently as you are now? Part of me thinks I would have been super inspired and just like, best book ever. And I want to potentially redirect my life to emulate Larry.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely the case for me. I’ve had this realisation that is semi-related in the last few years that there’s a huge trade-off — and this is going to sound obvious in hindsight, obviously, but it’s hard to recognise when you’re growing up — that there’s a big trade-off between a life where you’re constantly pursuing, in my case, sort of like academic endeavours, but whatever endeavours they happen to be, whether you want to become the best engineer or whatever you can. You’re moving around for schools and for jobs and chasing opportunities, etc. There’s a big trade-off between a life like that, where you’re moving around a lot, and the sort of life where you just stay in one community for most of your life and have really, really deep roots. And I’ve come to view this as sort of a — not socially conservative in the sense of people’s like sexual behaviours or anything, but just a more conservative leaning view about the importance of family and community to your well-being, as opposed to a sort of more perhaps elitist liberal mentality of, you know, like go chase dreams across the world and go travel and go live various different places. And I think I had a lot of encouragement in that sort of direction growing up.
And that’s not precisely Larry’s motivation either, but his choices also lead him to this life where he’s travelling around constantly and seeking opportunities. And he refuses to stay in one place for a long time. And I’m really coming to see the trade-off of that sort of lifestyle as I grow older. And that’s not to say that, you know, I regret the kind of life I’ve lived, but, you know, I tend to move around every few years. And there’s just — yeah, there’s both pros and cons. Like, you meet a lot of new people, you do a lot of new things, and that’s great. But you also don’t have the opportunity to just lay down really deep roots in one sort of community. And so I think, yeah, at twenty years old, I would have taken Larry’s sort of lifestyle as unequivocally good. And he would have been a positive role model. I would have said, yeah, travelling around the world like that, learning as much as possible, is sort of the ultimate way to be. But now I’m a little more hesitant and sort of aware of the consequences of those sorts of choices, especially because it is zero sum to some extent. Like, you know, you can either travel around and go to various elite schools and do all this stuff, or you can stay at home and have similar social circles your whole life, but they’ll be very deep rooted. And there’s something sort of like beautiful about that that I think you don’t get if you’re travelling around.
And then, yeah, I think on that note, a character I would have liked to see — like a true foil, sort of related to what you were saying earlier, Cam — a true foil in this sort of book would have been a character who does precisely that. Who sort of, you know, is materially perhaps not as focused as, say, Isabel and Gray and people like that, but stays with those sort of connections throughout their whole life and seeks sort of the same equanimity that someone like Larry is seeking, but does it by just like really rooting themselves into one community and staying put. And no one in the book really has that side of them, right? Because everyone is chasing various things. And I thought for a while Isabel might be that sort of character, but she’s not quite there, right? There’s other things she wants. And she’s sort of envious of Larry’s life in some sense, or at least of not having Larry. And she’s detached from her children as well. She’s like not the greatest mother.
Cam: Oh, that’s a great point. She’s detached from her family.
Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cam: So yeah, so no one has quite filled that gap for me. And that would have been an interesting character, I think, in the book to have.
Benny: Yeah, Isabel’s almost there. But yeah, no, I think you’re right. Part of it, I think, is like the social norms or religious customs and stuff. Like when you totally reject all those, it’s kind of like the Chesterton’s fence thing. And you go do this — there’s amazing things. But it’s like, well, actually, there is this trade-off that is kind of hard to see sometimes. And sometimes it’s like implicit — it’s almost implicit knowledge type thing. It’s sometimes hard to articulate. And we kind of say like community and things like that and social bonds. But just how important they are to the good life, that Larry’s kind of a shorin’, right?
Cam: Yeah, so I’m curious to see which way Maugham takes it. What happens to Larry in these last two parts? What about you, Rich? Do you think it would have been sympathetic to his choices when you were younger? I mean, in some sense the answer must be yes for you, right? Because in some sense you did a lot of what he did in terms of just picking up and travelling around.
Benny: You’re the Kosti now. Being there, done that. Bought the t-shirt in Bangkok.
Rich: I think that the big difference between Larry and I, apart from our forearm attractiveness, is like I was interested in material success and that was a big part of why I left. Because — okay, I didn’t leave a super lucrative job, I left a journalism crappy job. But anyway, like most of the things I was trying to figure out were very much self-improvement things, and especially financial independence life hack type things where I was trying to secure my financial future. I mean, I was reading also a lot of like Scott Alexander and LessWrong type stuff and epistemology type stuff for sure. But my primary motivation was like, how can I be clever and amass enough money or lifestyle so that I can escape from having to be a wage slave? So I think that’s a less noble motivation. I guess to be fair, like, Larry just had that sort of built in right from the outset, since he had a little bit of money to live on. And then my love of learning and obsession has come a little bit later on in life, where now it’s an end unto itself, whereas a lot of what I used to be reading was like a means to an end basically.
And then I also think that it’s hard to put myself in the shoes, but like, I think you stop — you start falling out of love with Larry pretty quickly in this book actually. First couple of chapters, hell yeah, he’s awesome. But I think pretty soon you find him a little bit icky or unrelatable or something. He’s like a bit of a cold fish. I mean, I’m certainly fallen — I’ve fallen out of love with Larry by this point in the book already. I’m like, he’s kind of cool but like I don’t want to emulate that. I don’t want to be alone like he’s alone. I want to relate to people and I want to — I don’t know.
Benny: I probably think he’s an extreme version of about, and like Elliot Templeton’s an extreme version of total kind of status seeking and the normal kind of material consumption — Veblenian sort of leisure class. And then Larry is this extreme and just totally itinerant and yeah, no material positions. And I think when you read this book you kind of want ten more Larry, or like fifty — you kind of realise I want to be like fifty more Larry. I want to go in that direction. I don’t want to like totally emulate him, you know. And some people will, I suppose. I know one guy kind of does that. He’s not working. He does a little bit of gardening on the side to like pay his rent. He does like the gardening of this big hippie share house, so he doesn’t have to pay rent. And he just does yoga and he reads. And yeah, and again, like I kind of get on board with that until he starts talking about some nonsense and I’m like, well, okay, you’re just smoking acid — doing acid, taking acid — and being nonsensical right now. But when he starts talking wisely, I’m kind of like, well, you know, I can get behind that. Anyway, I’m repeating myself.
What happened to muses? (these old service sector jobs)
Cam: Yeah, we’re running up on time, but there’s just one other thing that I wanted to bring up. Just a small thing, which is that the character of Suzanne is really interesting. And what it got me thinking about is, it’s crazy to me — I didn’t quite realise that this was like a whole job, like a type of job, was to be a muse or a mistress to an artist. And not just sit for their paintings, but also be kind of like a quasi housemaid and lover and, you know, looking after the sort of material concerns of the artist so that they can focus on the divine or whatever. And then like when one artist can’t afford to pay for her services anymore, then she gets hired by another artist. It’s really interesting as a sort of an archetype of a person, of a woman in particular, which I don’t know if that really exists anymore. But it clearly seems to have been like a big thing and like kind of an important job in and of itself. So what — like, what happened to them? For the muses. And she’s also — she’s described as being really ugly, which is super funny. So it’s not even about like having a hot side piece or whatever. It’s something older, something more than that.
Rich: No, I mean, she started doing it when she was young. She started when she was seventeen or something.
Cam: Was she ugly when she was young?
Rich: I don’t know. You kind of imply that. I mean, I don’t think she was ever considered a great beauty.
Benny: You wouldn’t be ugly at age forty but beautiful at age eighteen. It doesn’t really work like that. If you were a great beauty, you would remain beautiful at age forty. So yeah, it’s definitely not that she was —
Cam: Online tells me this is exactly how it works as soon as you hit twenty-seven.
Rich: What happens?
Cam: You hit the wall.
Benny: There’s something you hit, yeah.
Rich: Or it only happens to women, right? Men get more distinguished.
Cam: Men get like cloned up. Our sexual value peaks at fifty-five or something.
Benny: Yeah. It reminded me of Tyler Cowen, these new service sector jobs. It was like, oh, this is an old job. This old service sector job that doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. You can imagine Jed Martin painting it along with horse butchers and tobacconists.
Cam: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It just feels like this kind of a cool old school —
Rich: There’s something I find really romantic and charming, and it seems sad that it’s — there’s something kind of aristocratic about it as well, it’s kind of — maybe it’s empowering. It’s like perhaps something that gets lost in modern feminism or something where, I don’t know, you’re like — you’re much more than just like their sex partner. You are — I mean — but you are sort of not subservient to them, but certainly like you’re walking — you’re in their shadow for sure. The muse is not going to get remembered to the same degree the artist does, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less of an important role to hold.
Cam: I remember in Midnight in Paris, I think, like Owen Wilson, who kind of plays the Woody Allen character, goes back, and Marion Cotillard, I think she’s Picasso’s muse, right? And I think she kind of potentially plays that role. I might be misremembering. And she’s kind of this interesting person. Yeah. And plays an important role for Picasso.
Benny: Yeah, Picasso definitely had a muse. I think he had a couple.
Cam: Yeah. No, but this is distinct from just like, you know, mistress or whatever. I mean, it sort of blurs together a bit, but yeah.
Benny: One other thing, just around — I suppose the setting is — I was thinking like, this movie sort of set in the twenties and the thirties, and like it’s set in Paris and Chicago. It’s like the American city. And it just made me think around like the decline of Chicago as like a major city. And it was sort of known as the second city, and it was really big. And then like, even back in the 1990s, there were like all these — I think John Hughes movies, who’s like a screenwriter director, did like Home Alone, a lot of those coming of age, like a pretty impressive — Breakfast Club, so like all set in Chicago. And it kind of felt like, oh man, this is going to be the next New York, or even rivals New York. And fast forward to sort of 2024 and it doesn’t feel like that at all. And I know like crime is part of that discussion as well. But yeah, I think so this is the twenties — when was that the big World Fair? That was like early 1900s. Like Chicago won that, and they had this big World Fair. And it’s just like totally major city.
Cam: Yeah, the world expos, do they still have those anymore?
Rich: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s when they got everyone sort of comes from all around the world and has their little stall.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: It’s like some guy from New Zealand. It’s like, oh, we’ve come up with a new kind of meringue-based dessert.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. This one’s lemon.
Benny: And the mounting gear. But you’d have like some guy like in a lotus position in a stall.
Cam: You can see some orientalist kind of critiques around it all. There’s probably always a bias as well on those sort of things.
Benny: I’m getting distracted now. The people that come to them, the people engaging with the West. Anyway, I’m getting distracted. But yeah, just Chicago is a major city.
Cam: So is there anything else that you guys want to mention? I’m pretty curious to see what happens in these last two parts. So we’re going to finish the book by next week.
Benny: Yeah, bro. Easy peasy.
Cam: Until next time.
Rich: Sweet.
Benny: See you later, fellas.
Rich: All right.
Cam: See you, boys.
