[Greetings, friends, from Austin! I’ve written before on the Deceptions of Desire and once again find the topic top of mind. With 2024 looming, it’s always a natural time to reflect on the past year while planning for the next. Of course, reflections of that flavor usually mean thinking about wheres, whats, and whos of time—where you want to spend more time, what you want to spend more time doing, and who you want to spend time with. All completely normal things to think about. Perhaps even noble if they (re)orient you toward what’s highest.
But with such reflections always comes a caution. Here, “The Inner Ring” always returns to the surface of my awareness. “The Inner Ring” was the Memorial Lecture delivered by C.S. Lewis at King’s College, University of London, in 1944. Its focus is the type of world the audience would step into—a world where our innate desire to be a part of a group we think others see as desirable keeps us marching toward a destination we don’t really even want to reach. I was first exposed to the speech eight years ago as part of a law school course titled “Foundations of Justice,” and, like a mental boomerang, it hasn’t stopped returning to me at regular intervals since.
In fact, I can quite confidently credit the speech, its insights, and its warnings as some of the primary driving forces behind my leaving the much-coveted path of nearly every law student—the path to becoming a big law partner. But four years into the journey, I got a (metaphorical) visit from Lewis and “The Inner Ring,” looked around at my firm’s offices, and knew, in my heart of hearts, I did not want to become what I was becoming. I had fallen into the exact trap Lewis warns about—allowing my desire for the Inner Ring to push me toward decisions and a path that was not my own.
While I may have avoided that particular catastrophe, I still catch myself craving entry into the Inner Ring in other arenas. Writing. Fitness. Entrepreneurship. You name it. There’s always another, more exclusive, community to belong to. And if we’re not careful, our desire to reach what’s always in sight but forever out of reach will keep any hope of a fulfilling life at bay along with it. “If [we] follow[] that desire [we] will reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.”
It is that reminder and message—the one I need as I set my intentions for this next year—that is the topic of today’s essay.]
The classical world provided more enduring images than I can hope to cover in a lifetime, but certainly among the most memorable and relevant to the topic of desire is that of the Danaids.
As the story goes, the Danaids (or Danaides) were the fifty daughters of Danaus destined to marry the fifty sons of Aegyptus. Upon the instruction of their father, all but one of the daughters killed their husbands on their wedding night. As punishment, each daughter is condemned to spend eternity in Tartarus trying to fill a bathtub without a bottom (to wash away their sins). C.S. Lewis called this a “symbol not of one vice, but of all vices,”1 representing the idea of being ruled by a desire that forever goes unfulfilled.
Those familiar with the Harry Potter series might remember a scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where Harry tries to give Dumbledore water after the headmaster has downed the terrible Emerald Potion on their quest for a Horcrux in a cave:
‘Water,’ croaked Dumbledore.
‘Water,’ panted Harry. ‘Yes—’ He leapt to his feet and seized the goblet he had dropped in the basin; he barely registered the golden locket lying curled beneath it.
‘Aguamenti!’ he shouted, jabbing the goblet with his wand. The goblet filled with clear water; Harry dropped to his knees beside Dumbledore, raised his head, and brought the glass to his lips—but it was empty. Dumbledore groaned and began to pant. ‘But I had some—wait—Aguamenti!’ said Harry again, pointing his wand at the goblet. Once more, for a second, clear water gleamed within it, but as he approached Dumbledore’s mouth, the water vanished again. ‘Sir, I'm trying, I'm trying!’ said Harry desperately, but he did not think that Dumbledore could hear him; he had rolled onto his side and was drawing great, rattling breaths that sounded agonizing. ‘Aguamenti—Aguamenti—AGUAMENTI!’The goblet filled and emptied once more. And now Dumbledore’s breathing was fading. His brain whirling in panic, Harry knew, instinctively, the only way left to get water, because Voldemort had planned it so ... He flung himself over to the edge of the rock and plunged the goblet into the lake, bringing it up full to the brim of icy water that did not vanish.2
These images of the container full for a second but empty the next give us an accurate depiction of how we are defeated by desire. We sweat and shout until we get what we thought we wanted, only to find it cannot deliver on its promise. We follow the desire only to reach nowhere worth reaching and decide it must be in the next desire that our promised land awaits. So the cycle continues.
Some of us recognize this somewhat easily when it comes to material things. We’ve been told repeatedly that things won’t make us happy, so we’ve learned to spot ambushes from that type of desire from a mile away.
We’re far worse, however, at seeing another desire that is just as (if not more) pernicious: our desire to be an insider—to be in what C.S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring.” Like our desire for material wealth, it too can keep us always an arms-length away from enough and forever on the edge of happiness. Lewis describes our impulse this way:
[Y]ou have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites.
Many of us see (or have seen) this phenomenon in our work lives. In law, first, you are a summer intern, then a junior associate, senior associate, and finally, a partner. But then you arrive and find still more inner rings. Regional top lawyer lists, national recognitions, and world awards. Every profession and endeavor, from fitness to education, has its equivalent—something more exclusive always waits just on the other side of our entry into one ring and keeps us always chasing. Lewis again:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
Something in us covets what we think others covet. We have this strange tendency, especially in the first half of our lives, to pick pursuits based on a desire to be inside something that we think will make us valuable or worthy. Except like the Danaids’ sieve, we arrive only to find ourselves empty.
What Lewis wanted his audience (and us) to realize and ponder is this: what has (or does) the desire to be in the Inner Ring cause you to do or pursue? Does the desire result in doing things that are not true to you? Does it cause you to abandon yourself and act in a way you are ashamed of?
In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.
…
My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.
…
As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
…
Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.
…
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
You never know who might love the person or the work you hide while you’re busy trying to belong. Only by devoting yourself to pursuits where what you do is a reflection of who you are can you come to attract and consort with those whose company can lead to something approximating Aristotle’s idea of true friendship, which is born, as Lewis notes elsewhere, “at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’” The places worth arriving are the places where the arrival of others is not planned or plotted; it is almost the accidental result of two (or more) people simply being that which they are. It was not the desire to be in that brought them there but the desire to be themselves.
To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching.
The things we do for acceptance are the dangerous ones. Because they ensure we never find the very acceptance we’re looking for. Any embrace we find is not for us; it is for a costumed character. Only by doing more things as ends in themselves, things we do for their own sake—things we would do even if we could not boast about it to the world—can we hope to find end up in places worth reaching.
Everything else will leave us empty, our whole life swept away until we are too old to care.
C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring, available at: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/. All of the block quotes in this essay (except for the Harry Potter one noted below) are from The Inner Ring.
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.