4 ideas
Intellectual status in cultivated circles is largely inherited and self-reinforcing: children of established figures gain access, deference, and assumed competence without having produced anything of their own. The currency of this world is association and pedigree rather than demonstrated work, so proximity to a famous parent functions as a credential.
A person can sustain an entire public self around a project they never complete, where the perpetual 'working on the great book' supplies an identity that finishing would dissolve. The deferral protects the ego from judgment, because an unfinished work cannot fail while an actual one can.
An admired intellectual authority can be revealed as hollow when scrutinized by someone outside the social system that props him up — the deference of insiders masks a lack of substance that only a stranger, immune to the charm, will name. Viewing a celebrated figure through the eyes of someone with nothing to gain exposes the gap between reputation and actual achievement.
A catastrophe arrives in the middle of characters' petty ambitions and romantic entanglements, exposing how trivial their preoccupations were while also failing to fundamentally transform them. The disruption rearranges circumstances and offers some characters convenient exits, but personal crises and vanities resume rather than dissolve in the face of historical rupture.