From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize." He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover ther

From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize." He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack. Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).