#john haffenden

Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Journals: 'neurotic solutions tot he problem of living.'

Eliot more or less equates these 'day jobs' for his purposes, seeing them all as providing a man of literary inclinations with economic security and at least enough time to write well-informed essays and book reviews (as Eliot himself had done during his eight years at the bank). Today this equation no longer holds; there is now a much sharper contrast between a university post and the other occupations, and we hardly think of a job in a bank or a commercial house, or even perhaps in the civil service, as allowing much leisure to 'think, and read, and write' about literary and intellectual matters.