The permanent measure now stands without the order that once made it the visible center of collective life. Rank, rite, and sacred authority once carried it in public, so that a man of quality met it outside himself as well as within. Those supports have withdrawn. He does not invent a softer standard to match the climate. He continues to live by the same criterion that once ordered the higher civilizations, and the solitude of that criterion is now part of the condition.
The age multiplies temporary measures, and each one arrives already dressed as final. Success, visibility, comfort, the approval of the current room, the output a job can count. They replace one another without embarrassment. The differentiated man sees the succession and keeps the permanent measure upstream of it, as the criterion that judges every temporary standard. Entering the succession in order to feel current is how the line gets spent.
Young men feel the solitude as a pressure to adopt a more popular criterion so that belonging can resume. A group will take him if he will rank things the way the group ranks them. A feed will confirm him if he will speak in its weather. The hunger to be seen makes the trade look small, and it is the whole trade. Distance from the current, when it comes from keeping the measure, is the late form of the older hierarchical distance, and it can be kept without theater.
Live by that measure on the next choice that will not be applauded: how the body is used, what is spoken, what company is kept, what is refused without a speech. Each of those either keeps the criterion present or replaces it with the weather of the hour. A restored world would confirm the man who holds it. Confirmation is not the work. The work is to keep judging by a measure the age has stopped supplying.