The Wolf At The Door
Three years after the Broadway success of his play The Glass Menagerie made him rich and famous, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote an essay titled, The Catastrophe of Success, in 1947. “The sort of life that I had lived previous to popular success,” Williams writes, “was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” It was a hard life: Williams worked menial jobs—as a factory worker, a theater usher, an elevator operator, and a manual laborer—making minimum wage, “which covered my [rent] and left me seven dollars for meals,” and writing stories and plays in the margins of his days. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he writes. When the struggles were removed and replaced with the luxuries of lavish hotel suites, expensive restaurants, and a constant stream of people offering to do things for him—Williams found himself feeling empty and depressed. He grew distant from family and friends, distrustful of people’s motives, and disconnected from his work, resenting it for bringing him fame and fortune. Without the vital efforts that defined his earlier life, Williams writes that he came to “fully apprehend” that “the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation [a state in which things essential for human well-being are scarce or lacking] but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.” That the human organism needs struggle, that our best qualities are forged in the white-hot furnace of conflict and effort, that success can be a catastrophe—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
This Is The Great Curse
In the movie There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview, travels from town to town, buying land from unsuspecting farmers who don’t know that they’re sitting on fortunes of oil. Plainview acquires these plots cheaply, positioning himself to cash in on the demand for oil, as it lights homes, powers factories, and fuels the automobiles transforming America in the 20th century. He drills wells and builds pipelines, refineries, and railways, ensuring every drop of oil flows directly into his profits. As his business grows, Plainview goes from being a lone prospector to a wealthy oil tycoon, piling up a huge fortune while leaving farmers and towns depleted and exploited in his wake. With his wealth, he builds the sprawling Plainview mansion—a vast estate filled with dark, wood-paneled rooms, large parlors, elaborate chandeliers, antique fixtures, and a private two-lane bowling alley. It’s an isolated fortress where Plainview spends his days aimlessly, while a crew of men work in the fields on his behalf. With nothing to do, Plainview turns to drinking to numb himself from the emptiness of his existence and the compromises he’s made. Often drunk and bitter, he alienates everyone around him. Alone, he stews over old betrayals, grudges, and hollow ambitions, all leading to the film’s famous final scene: Plainview lures Eli Sunday, the preacher he’s privately hated for years, into his bowling alley. In his drunken despair, Plainview staggers after Eli, chasing him up and down the lanes before bludgeoning him to death with a bowling pin. When his butler appears to check on the steak dinner he had prepared, Plainview puts down the pin and says, “I’m finished.”
The rise and fall of the fictional Daniel Plainview is based on the real-life stories of early 20th-century oil tycoons like Edward Doheny, Harry Sinclair, and J. Paul Getty. “If you’ve heard one of their stories,” There Will Be Blood writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson said, “you’ve more or less heard them all.” While researching these figures, Anderson became intrigued by this pattern: “they all started as gold and silver prospectors, turned to oil when it became the thing to look for, made enormous fortunes, and then ended up in jail or there was a murder or a suicide or a scandal. Whatever it was, these stories ended the same way: they didn’t end up happy.”
In his research to play Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis came to believe that it’s not just the oil titans of the 20th century—most who come into unprecedented wealth end up unhappy. “This is the great curse,” Day-Lewis said, “what does a man or woman do when they don’t have to work anymore?” Free from the vital efforts of life, all struggle and conflict removed, Day-Lewis continues, “they’re constantly inventing these fantastical things for themselves, to give what they believe might be some significance to their lives. And yet, they’re missing the point because it’s our work—it’s our work that sustains us more than anything else.”
I’ve Just Been Going, ‘If You Aren’t Challenged, Then Don’t Do This Anymore.’
In the middle of shooting the fifth episode of The Newsroom, the show’s lead Jeff Daniels fell to a knee. “Give me the line again,” he yelled to the script supervisor. “Give me the line again.” She yelled back the line. He just has to repeat it. He can’t. “Give me it again.” She does once then twice more. He can’t keep a single word in his head. “Ok Jeff,” the director said. “Why don’t you go home?” In his two decades of acting, Daniels never struggled like this. This was his first time working for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Every actor who gets asked about working for Sorkin inevitably mentions the word “dialogue.” Sorkin is known as a master of writing dialogue. And as is the nature of working for a master, expectations are high. “You have to memorize mountains of dialogue,” Daniels said. “And then you have to spit it out at a hundred miles an hour.” That means actors can’t do what actors typically do: memorize their lines in the makeup chair. “I’ve seen day-players come in on Newsroom, and they’re trying to learn three pages of Sorkin in the makeup chair, and the flop sweat hits them. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.” Daniels would come to call it “getting Sorkinized.” He was the first to fall to a knee in that first season of filming The Newsroom but not the last: “We all, at some point, took a knee.” Daniels tells this story when asked how he decides what jobs to take. He said he has to be at least pretty sure the job will be at least pretty hard. Because if it’s not hard, it’s easy. If it’s easy, he’s not getting better. If he’s not getting better, what is he doing? A few months after getting Sorkinized, he won an Emmy Award for Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the first season of The Newsroom. A few years later, he got a call from Sorkin, who had just acquired the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted Daniels to play Atticus Finch. Sorkin warned him that what they were attempting—adapting a book almost universally beloved for the stage—was probably a “suicide mission.” “I didn’t blink,” Daniels said. “I’ve just been going, ‘if you aren’t challenged, then don’t do this anymore.’” The play opened on Broadway in December of 2018. It shattered opening week box office records and became the highest grossing play in Broadway history.
How Many People Would Quit Right Now?
The NBA Hall of Famer Chris Bosh said it was something he learned from Kobe Bryant: you gotta love the parts that aren’t fun, he said, you gotta love the parts that are a struggle. Playing in the NBA is fun. Practicing and conditioning and sacrificing enough to make it to and in the NBA is a struggle. Publishing books is fun. Writing and researching and thinking and rethinking is a struggle. Filming a scene (when you’ve got all the lines in your head) is fun. Memorizing mountains of lines is a struggle. Acing a client presentation is fun. Preparing and ideating and considering that you might not ace it is a struggle. Chris said he has this thing he says to himself anytime he’s struggling, “I always like to think, ‘how many people would quit right now?’ That’s the first thing I think about. Then I keep going.”
The Secret Struggle of Strong Trees
While trees require sunlight to grow, the strongest and longest-living trees don’t get much sunlight during their early years. Instead, they spend their first few decades “waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade,” Peter Wohlleben explains in The Secret Wisdom of Nature. Limited sunlight leads to slow growth. Slow growth leads to the development of dense, long-lasting wood. Youngsters without any shade, on the other hand, grow fast and therefore develop wood that is airy and susceptible to fungi, yeasts, molds, and mildews. So for trees, growth without a little struggle is the great curse, Wohlleben writes: “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old.” “Developing mighty trunks takes a great deal of energy.” It requires that a tree “struggle for every ray of sunlight.”
The Elemental Happiness That Comes From Being Alive
“Most people in their ‘pursuit of happiness’ run after good fortune and make themselves unhappy even when it befalls them,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Human Condition. “There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance—[such as] great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death—ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”