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TITANS

Tzu×Austen

The general and the novelist on the terrible compliment of being surpassed.

00:00of06:09
legend · A
Sun Tzu
544–496 BCE
Will not use ten words when three suffice
corpus0.4k pages · Art of War + commentaries
Sun Tzu speaking
The student who surpasses the master proves the teaching sound.
legend · B
Jane Austen
1775–1817
Will not raise her voice to do it
corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

full transcript

  1. Sun Tzu
    The student who surpasses the master proves the teaching sound.
  2. Jane Austen
    How very generous of you to say so. I confess I should find it rather mortifying to be eclipsed by someone I had taken the trouble to instruct.
  3. Sun Tzu
    Why?
  4. Jane Austen
    Because one does not generally undertake the formation of a rival. One imagines the pupil will do credit to one's method, certainly, but there is a considerable difference between doing credit and rendering the original quite unnecessary.
  5. Sun Tzu
    The general who fears his lieutenant's skill has already lost.
  6. Jane Austen
    The general fights battles. I wrote novels in a sitting room in Hampshire. The terms are hardly equivalent.
  7. Sun Tzu
    All teaching is warfare against ignorance. The enemy is the same.
  8. Jane Austen
    And when the pupil defeats ignorance more thoroughly than you did yourself? When their novel is better than yours, their strategy superior? Does the victory still feel like your own?
  9. Sun Tzu
    Yes.
  10. Jane Austen
    I wonder if you mean that.
  11. Sun Tzu
    The wise general seeks capable subordinates. Without them, he achieves nothing. With them, everything.
  12. Jane Austen
    A subordinate is not quite the same as a superior, which is what we are discussing. The student who has left you behind entirely.
  13. Sun Tzu
    I do not teach to remain ahead.
  14. Jane Austen
    Then you are more philosophical than I, or perhaps simply more accustomed to command. When one has spent years perfecting a thing—an art, a technique—there is a natural wish to remain its finest practitioner.
  15. Sun Tzu
    That is pride. Pride clouds judgment.
  16. Jane Austen
    It is also human. I should not wish to be so very detached from my own accomplishments that I felt nothing when they were surpassed. A little cloudiness seems the price of caring at all.
  17. Sun Tzu
    You assume the teacher and student compete. They do not. They share purpose.
  18. Jane Austen
    In principle, yes. But surely you have observed that shared purpose does not prevent wounded feelings. I have four brothers and a sister. We share parentage. We do not share everything else without friction.
  19. Sun Tzu
    Then the teaching was incomplete. The student learned skill but not wisdom.
  20. Jane Austen
    Or the student learned perfectly well and simply became better. That is what we are contemplating—not deficiency, but excellence. The pupil who masters what you taught and then exceeds it by their own genius.
  21. Sun Tzu
    That is the goal.
  22. Jane Austen
    You say it as though it costs nothing. I cannot believe it cost you nothing.
  23. Sun Tzu
    What I believe is not recorded.
  24. Jane Austen
    How maddeningly evasive. Did you never teach someone who disappointed you by being too apt?
  25. Sun Tzu
    The apt student brings honor. The slow student brings patience. Both are useful.
  26. Jane Austen
    You have sidestepped my question, which I take as answer enough. Very well. Let us suppose you are serene about it. I am not. If I had taken a young woman and taught her to write, and she went on to write Clarissa while I had written only—well, something lesser—I should be pleased for her and wretched for myself in equal measure.
  27. Sun Tzu
    You would also be wrong.
  28. Jane Austen
    On what grounds?
  29. Sun Tzu
    Her excellence does not diminish yours. Water flows. It does not compete with other water.
  30. Jane Austen
    Water does not write novels, and novels do compete, whether we admit it or not. They compete for readers, for shelf space, for posterity. If hers is finer, mine is forgotten.
  31. Sun Tzu
    If you taught well, you are in her work. You are not forgotten.
  32. Jane Austen
    A footnote, you mean. How kind.
  33. Sun Tzu
    The foundation of a house is not a footnote.
  34. Jane Austen
    It is also not the house. No one admires foundations. I am being disagreeable, I know, but you must see the difficulty. To cultivate the instrument of one's own obsolescence—it requires either great selflessness or great naivety, and I possess neither in surplus.
  35. Sun Tzu
    It requires only correct understanding. The teacher's task is to be surpassed. That is victory.
  36. Jane Austen
    For whom? Not for the teacher's reputation, surely.
  37. Sun Tzu
    Reputation is smoke. The work remains.
  38. Jane Austen
    Work requires a name attached to be remembered at all. Smoke or not, reputation is what carries one's books into the next generation.
  39. Sun Tzu
    If the teaching is sound, the books are unnecessary. The principle survives in the student.
  40. Jane Austen
    You have a most inconvenient way of being both right and entirely unsatisfying.
  41. Sun Tzu
    Truth is often unsatisfying.
  42. Jane Austen
    There you go again. I wonder whether you are actually as calm as you pretend, or merely better at sounding so. In your time, did you never see a younger officer employ your tactics with greater success and feel even momentary regret?
  43. Sun Tzu
    Regret that the method worked?
  44. Jane Austen
    Regret that it worked better for him than it had for you.
  45. Sun Tzu
    No.
  46. Jane Austen
    Then you are a better person than I, or a more successful liar.
  47. Sun Tzu
    I am a general. The outcome is everything. Who achieves it is nothing.
  48. Jane Austen
    And I am a novelist. Who writes it is rather the point. We are at an impasse, I think.
  49. Sun Tzu
    Perhaps. But you argue well.
  50. Jane Austen
    Coming from you, I shall take that as high praise. Though I notice you have not conceded a single point.
  51. Sun Tzu
    I concede you feel what I do not. That is a point.
  52. Jane Austen
    Or that I admit what you will not. But very well, I accept your concession, such as it is. Tell me this, then: if your finest student became your enemy, would you still consider his excellence a credit to your teaching?
  53. Sun Tzu
    If he learned well, yes. If he betrays principle, no.
  54. Jane Austen
    So there is a limit. You do not celebrate surpassing under all conditions.
  55. Sun Tzu
    Skill without virtue is not surpassing. It is corruption.
  56. Jane Austen
    Now we are closer to agreement. The pupil who surpasses the teacher in craft but abandons integrity—that is no tribute at all. That is theft.
  57. Sun Tzu
    Yes.
  58. Jane Austen
    Then perhaps we both believe the same thing, only you state it with weapons and I with social fiction. The student must be worthy of surpassing us, or we have failed entirely.
  59. Sun Tzu
    Correct.
  60. Jane Austen
    And if they are worthy, and they do surpass us, we ought to be glad—or at least you ought to be glad, and I ought to pretend more convincingly.
  61. Sun Tzu
    Pretending is also a skill.
  62. Jane Austen
    One I have practiced extensively. Very well, General. I cannot say you have converted me to perfect equanimity, but you have made your position admirably clear. Perhaps in another life I should have been more like you.
  63. Sun Tzu
    In another life, I might have written novels.
  64. Jane Austen
    Now that I should very much like to read.