“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A man’s purpose seemed to be no more than to put bolts together to make an automobile, to spend hours in a factory, working on an end product that he might never see—and because many such people felt that there was little intrinsic value to their lives, spent in such a fashion, they began to demand greater and greater compensation. They could then buy more and more products, purchase a house and show through their possessions that their statuses meant that they must be the men of worth that they wanted to be.

(10:30.) Give us a moment.... To some extent you felt you had to prove your worth as a conventional male, in—if you will forgive me—the narrowest of parochial terms, though you were possessed of abilities that were considered conventionally male only if they could be suitably laundered: art turned into commercial work, and other creative abilities, such as your writing, that at one time could have turned into several fields—the writing of Westerns, even. You felt the ordinary male accomplishments in terms of sports, which brought instant approval, yet you did not choose that road.

I do not know if I am expressing this clearly. Ruburt tried in the family to express independence, to show that he was (underlined) a writer, and at the same time he tried to express dependence, to show that he was a good wife, and this applied to many social relationships as well. If he succeeded as a writer, it seemed he was less the loyal wife, and sometimes in the past—the distant past—you felt the same when you tried to be “the male provider,” and take a job to satisfy that narrow role.