The catastrophe of success -- confusing success with greatness

"If in fact you are not spiritually, politically, morally prepared to deal with success, then a catastrophe can follow you thereafter, and in fact it can blind you in your own quest for greatness. Because, if in fact all you think that life is about, are these fleeting pleasures, and these commodities, and you think you can possess your soul by means of possessing commodities, then you got some Nihilism, some existential emptiness, and spiritual malnutrition waiting for you."             - Dr Cornel West 

"One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you "have a name" is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions . . . — and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!" 

                     
                             - Tennessee Williams's essay, "The Catastrophe of Success"

In the end, "Purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life — live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.                             -  William Saroyan

........