Honest conversation [with Dorothy’s dissertation supervisor Judith] was pointless, because a declaration of feeling (I hate you / I love you) could never account for the myriad complications that manifested as emotional, even spiritual conflict, but were rooted in something material and intractable – their positions in the game. Judith was a teacher and a foster mother and an employer, and more than that, she was a node in a large and impersonal system that had anointed her a winner and Dorothy a loser, and due to institutional and systemic factors that were bigger than either of them – not more complicated, no, because no system is more complicated than a single human being – no one of Dorothy’s generation would ever accrue the kind of power Judith had, and this was a good thing even as it was an unjust and shitty thing. Judith was old and Dorothy was young, Judith had benefits and Dorothy had debts. The idols had been false but they had served a function, and now they were all smashed and no one knew what they were working for. The problem wasn’t the fall of the old system, it was that the new system had not arisen. Dorothy was like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.

From Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind 📚