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 its secrecy is acci-
dental, 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 Ringer can ever
have it.
--C. S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring"
