I’m currently reading Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” a gift from a friend of mine who is a student of German literature. It’s a very insightful and well-written book with a lot of humorous passages, though it’s a bit long-winded at times. Anyway, I recently came across a few quotes that struck me as at least kind of relevant to my current relationship with the game/profession of poker:
“…high-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideology. Hunters, for instance, would never dream of calling themselves the butchers of wild game; they prefer to call themselves the duly licensed friends of nature and animals; just as businessmen uphold the principle of an honorable profit, while the businessman’s god, Mercury, that distinguished promoter of international relations, is also the god of thieves. So the image of a profession in the minds of its practitioners is not too reliable.”
Upon reading this, I thought immediately of the professional players who claim they are providing entertainment in exchange for the money of the losing players. This is really just one example of the many excuses and justifications our community makes for the game. I find some of them more credible than others, but I do often have the nagging feeling that I am a little too eager to find some argument or another that can validate poker as a genuinely ethical pursuit.
“…the day when one must begin to live out one’s final will, before leaving the rest behind, lies far ahead and cannot be postpone. This had become menacingly clear to him now that almost xis months had gone by and nothing had changed. He was waiting: all the time, he was letting himself be pushed this way and that is the insignificant and silly activity he had taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing; he was waiting.”
I can’t help but feel this way sometimes, that all of the time I spend playing and thinking about poker really has very little to do with the kind of person I think of myself as or want to be. I started playing as a short-term means of paying the rent, and as the money got better and better, I became less and less inclined to pursue a real job or career. I always felt that I would do these things, but later, after saving up some money and such. But recently, I’ve been feeling more and more as though I have no criteria for what will be ‘enough’ or when it will be ‘later’ and time to start pursuing something else.
Both of these subjects have been on my mind lately, and I think Musil, writing about a different era (early twentieth century Vienna), nevertheless speaks somewhat eloquently to my current condition at times.