Bookbag: Richard Sennett

From Conscience of the Eye:

In one way, [Henry James's "The Best in the Jungle"] is a parable simply of a modern fear. One has to wait so long to be in a position to be ready, to know what one is doing, to be strong enough to "really live."

James intended "The Beast in the Jungle" to be a parable; it was to be of the "the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened." This representative man has failed to live, in living a life of inner anguish: "It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything." In mourning he discovers why the seeming inner drama of his life has been no life at all... There was a terrible shallowness in his obsession with his inner demons, the beast has bitten his consciousness, his knowledge that he can never regain time delayed. The beast was Marcher's waiting to live.

. . . If indeterminate and illogical, these stories [told in New York bars] were also curiously neutral, the speaker seldom moved by his tale, at least audibly, the voices recounting problems with women or big deal equably, perhaps with poise that polished repetition does give and also perhaps like Marcher driven by the compulsion to tell it once more in order that, by chance, the telling might suddenly reveal the hidden meaning of the tale.