'The quest of the Innner 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 the 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 that the Inner Ring produces. But it will do the 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 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 Innner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, 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 they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed in among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.'
CS Lewis, 'The Inner Ring' in Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.320.
