“With careful contemplation and conscious attention, I can avoid the heart-breaking quest for the Inner Ring.”

Sound Craftsman

by Ashton Burchfield (class of 2009)

An inner ring, as defined by C.S. Lewis in his essay of the same name, is any group of people who share something in common; whether it be the group itself, such as a social clique; a common interest, such as stamp collecting; or a social purpose, such as a Boy Scout troop.

C.S. Lewis writes that the existence of Inner Rings is “certainly unavoidable” and even that “it is (in itself) a good thing” that “personal friendship should grow up between those who work together.” The existence of Inner Rings is not an evil, but the “desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter.” Lewis writes that “a thing may be morally neutral, but the desire for that thing may be dangerous.”

When one discovers an Inner Ring, Lewis continues, there is usually an automatic, unavoidable “longing” to join that ring, for there is a “kind of pleasure we feel when we get in” and a definite “anguish when we are excluded.” This longing to be included may cause us to sacrifice or change parts of ourselves to fit into the ring.

One example of this longing and willingness to sacrifice parts of oneself to fit in is found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Young James Gatz, the seventeen-year-old son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,” lives in a constant state of longing for a life defined by “glamour” and “glory.” Gatz has scoured the coast of Lake Superior “as a clam digger and salmon fisher or in any capacity that brought him food and bed,” but his heart is “in a constant, turbulent riot,” for he has an “instinct for future glory.”

Soon Gatz meets Dan Cody, a “product of the Nevada silver fields.” Cody is fifty years old and “many times a millionaire.” To young Gatz, Dan Cody’s yacht “represented all the beauty and glamour in the world.”

James Gatz sees his opportunity to join the inner ring he has long desired to enter. Dan Cody is “the pioneer debauchee who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.” But Gatz’s desire to conform to the inner ring Cody represents is so strong that it eclipses any qualms about Cody’s shady dealings and allows Gatz to sacrifice parts of himself to gain admission to the Inner Ring. He changes his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, he changes his clothing from “a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants” to “a blue coat… white duck trousers, and a yachting cap,” and abandons his life and work on the coast of Lake Superior to travel with Dan Cody and be the yacht’s “steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and… jailor.” Gatsby and Cody travel together for five years, during which time “the vague contour of Jay Gatsby,” the “Platonic ideal” Gatz had imagined for himself, has “filled out to the substantiality of a man.”

After Dan Cody dies of mysterious causes, and leaves Gatsby with little means, Gatsby joins the military. He is stationed in Kentucky, where he meets Daisy, a girl who perfectly represents the Inner Ring Gatsby continues to aspire to join. Daisy epitomizes Gatsby’s “extravagant ambition” for status, for she is “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.” Daisy makes Gatsby “breathless,” and he “felt married to her” before he knew her. To Gatsby, who still longs for the inner ring of wealth and privilege, she “gleam[s] like silver,” and even her porch is “bright with the bought luxury of starshine.” Though he and Daisy have a brief relationship, after Gatsby is called off to war overseas, Daisy marries another man. But when Gatsby returns to the States, he has not yet given up on his inner-ring quest. He continues to idolize Daisy, continues to feel “married,” but not, as the narrator allows us to see, to the reality of Daisy, but to the qualities she symbolizes: “wealth, youth, and social status.”

In order to gain access to this Inner Ring, Gatsby pursues wealth by engaging in unlawful activities (it is suggested that one of his means of income is “bootlegging liquor.”) Gatsby secures enough funds to buy a mansion directly across the lake from Daisy’s house, where he can see the “single green light” of her dock in the night. Gatsby begins to host lavish parties in which he takes no pleasure in the hope that one night, Daisy or a friend of hers might attend.

Ultimately, Gatsby is rejected by Daisy. He falls apart because he has sacrificed so much of himself to secure acceptance into the Inner Ring of “glamour” and “glory.” His quest fails; his goals and dreams are shattered in an instant; as the narrator says, he “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” There is nothing left of the man who had given up everything to become Jay Gatsby.

What happened to Jay Gatsby certainly is horrible, but, as Lewis suggests, it is avoidable. Lewis explains, if “you make the work your end,” rather than making the quest to gain admission to an inner ring your goal, “you will be one of the sound craftsmen.” Work, here, does not just mean the operation of some tool or the building of some structure. Work can be striving to make a relationship work, striving to be a good father, son, or husband, or endeavoring in many other pursuits. The sound craftsman is the person who works for the love of his profession, the artisan who creates for the sake of the craft, the teacher who instructs for the good of the students, the husband who loves not the idea of, but the reality of his wife. If you take this approach to what you do in your life, Lewis writes, you will “find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are… snug and safe at the center of something that would look exactly like an inner ring,” but its “secrecy is accidental. This is friendship.” Such friendship can be found among craftsman who share space and time, but can also be found in craftsman who never knew one another personally. In other words, Shakespeare is friends with Dante and Hawthorne is friends with Homer, for they are all sound craftsman of a discipline: literature.

Another member of this group of sound craftsmen is Henry David Thoreau. In 1845, he left society’s inner rings and went to the woods where he began writing and attending to nature for its own sake. Thoreau, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, the neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was “a determined man.” Thoreau spent his life, as Donald McQuade writes in The Harper American Literature: Volume 1, “listening to the sounds of the voice that led him to his destiny.” He fled from a life of social anonymity to the woods, where, as he writes, he felt that he “was better known.” He found that he was, to use Lewis’ words, “snug and safe at the center” of the natural world and of his own thoughts and the thoughts of those whose works he read while in the woods. Thoreau strove to “live deliberately, … front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived.”

Thoreau’s mentor, Emerson, had previously urged him to keep a journal, and Thoreau continued to keep this journal during his time in the woods. When he emerged from his seclusion, he “spent five years reworking the material he had gathered into his journals.” To use Lewis’s words, he “made his work his end.” He “tinkered and copied, rewrote and recopied.” Through careful contemplation and conscious attention, Thoreau became a sound craftsman. He educated himself and those who listened to him speak and read his works. Through devotion to his work, and by avoiding the quest for the inner ring, he produced a masterpiece: Walden, a work of analysis and understanding, a textbook of consciousness to help us understand ourselves and the world around us, a book that stands on the same shelf as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and Homer’s Iliad.

Thoreau, through his sound craftsmanship, has taught me that with careful contemplation and conscious attention, I can avoid the heart-breaking quest for the Inner Ring, and by making my work my end, become a sound craftsman.

I hope that I can, through devotion to my work, become the person, artisan, teacher, or husband who works, crafts, instructs, or loves not for personal gain, but for the sake of whatever or whomever I am working for. I hope that I can succeed as Thoreau did, where Gatsby failed, and become, as Lewis explained, a sound craftsman. ■

The Road Taken

by Scott Watson (class of 2007)

All great discoveries find their roots in smaller decisions. The decision of the Wright Brothers’ father to give to them a small flying toy in childhood ultimately led to machine-powered flight. James Watson’s decision to study zoology ultimately led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. On a smaller level, a decision made by my fourth grade teacher to institute a reading contest led to my love of reading.

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