The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence.
It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope- an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet.
“I acquired expensive habits and affected manners.
0 kommentar(er)
