You are only showing your good taste.
Try to talk to the untrained man under thirty-five upon any subject
except himself. Bait him with different topics of universal interest,
and try to persuade him to leave his own point of view long enough to
look through the eyes of the world. And then notice the hopeless
persistence with which he avoids your dexterous efforts and mentally
lies down to worry his Ego again, like a dog with a bone.
The conceit of one of these men is the most colossal specimen of
psychological architecture in existence. As a social study, when I
have him under the microscope, I can enjoy this. I revel in it, just
as I do in a view of the ocean or the heavens at night--anything so
vast that I cannot see to the end of it. It suggests eternity or
space. But oh! what I have suffered from a mental contact with this
phase of him in society! Sometimes he really is ignorant--has no
brains at all--and then my suffering is lingering. Sometimes he really
knows a great deal--has the making of a man in him, only it lies
fallow for want of training--and then my suffering is acute. When
success--business or social or athletic or literary or artistic--comes
to the untrained man under thirty-five, it comes pitifully near being
his ruin.
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