{"id":11694,"date":"2025-10-11T18:51:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T22:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-not-to-be-a-victim-of-success-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T18:51:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T22:51:53","slug":"how-not-to-be-a-victim-of-success-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-not-to-be-a-victim-of-success-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Not to Be a Victim of Success \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

A self is a personal mythos \u2014 a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success \u2014 that affirmation of the self by the world \u2014 is the way it can ossifty the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure<\/a> \u2014 both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world\u2019s estimation.<\/p>\n

Rockwell Kent<\/a> (June 21, 1882\u2013March 13, 1971) labored at his singular paintings and prints in solitude, in penury, in obscurity for decades. When the New York art world declared him an overnight success, largely thanks to his transcendent account of nine months on a remote Alaskan island<\/a>, he left the city and moved to a quiet farmstead uptate, then left the continent, returning to the austere solitudes of the Arctic to paint, write, and reflect on the meaning of it all. In a lovely passage from N by E<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his altogether exquisite 1930 memoir of the year he spent in the far north, rife with wisdom on how to be more alive<\/a> \u2014 he models that courage, recounting a thrift store encounter that stands as a scale model of the disorientation of success. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Bowsprit<\/em> by Rockwell Kent, 1930. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fifteen years earlier, living in Newfoundland during WWI, Kent had adorned his doorway with a statue of a maiden he had found \u201cweatherbeaten and neglected in the rubbish heap of a ship store,\u201d which he had washed, sanded, painted, and bejeweled to restore her haunting beauty. When the time came for him to return to New York, he yearned to take her home, but could not afford the fees:<\/p>\n

\n

I offered what I could for her. But I was poor and it was little. So I left her there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A decade passed. The gallery world awoke to the shimmering originality of his paintings and Kent became one of New York\u2019s most celebrated artists. One day, he wandered into a thift store and there was his maiden, \u201chardly changed\u201d \u2014 a ghost of the life that had changed so profoundly, yet in that moment Kent realized how hard he must fight to keep it from changing him, from turning him into a statue of himself. He recounts:<\/p>\n

\n

Out from among rare cabinets and chairs and clocks and porcelains, the frayed and mellowed chattels of decayed gentility, she stared \u2014 that sailor\u2019s sweetheart \u2014 vacantly, as if the room, the city and the world were part of the wide sea and firmament that she was born to. And as I turned and ran to her, and sweet memories and almost love crowded and clamored in my brain and breast, as I reached out to touch her as I used to \u2014 suddenly I dared not. And I knew what changes time and affluence had wrought. And I reproached myself.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere did you find her?\u201d I asked the salesman in a whisper. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn Boston,\u201d he whispered back. <\/p>\n

So then \u2014 not even asking what her city price might be \u2014 I tiptoed out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple this modern koan, which releases more and more nuances of wisdom the more you turn it over on the tongue of the mind, with Arundhati Roy on the deepest measure of success<\/a>, then revisit Kent on wilderness, solitude, and creativity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A self is a personal mythos \u2014 a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}