Men Had Been Living A

There Is No Virtue In Curiosity. In Fact, It Might Be The Most Immoral Desire A Man Can Possess.

I Had Long Since Insisted Upon Interpreting The Things That Fate Forced Me To Do As Victories Of My Own Will And Intelligence, And Now This Bad Habit Had Grown Into A Sort Of Frenzied Arrogance. In The Nature Of What I Was Calling My Intelligence There Was A Touch Of Something Illegitimate, A Touch Of The Sham Pretender Who Has Been Placed On The Throne By Some Freak Chance. This Dolt Of A Usurper Could Not Foresee The Revenge That Would Inevitably Be Wreaked Upon His Stupid Despotism.

What I Wanted Was To Die Among Strangers, Untroubled, Beneath A Cloudless Sky. And Yet My Desire Differed From The Sentiments Of That Ancient Greek Who Wanted To Die Under The Brilliant Sun. What I Wanted Was Some Natural, Spontaneous Suicide. I Wanted A Death Like That Of A Fox, Not Yet Well Versed In Cunning, That Walks Carelessly Along A Mountain Path And Is Shot By A Hunter Because Of Its Own Stupidity.

Within Those Confining Walls, Teachers - A Bunch Of Men All Armed With The Same Information - Gave The Same Lectures Every Year From The Same Notebooks And Every Year At The Same Point In The Textbooks Made The Same Jokes.

Was I Ignorant, Then, When I Was Seventeen? I Think Not. I Knew Everything. A Quarter-century's Experience Of Life Since Then Has Added Nothing To What I Knew. The One Difference Is That At Seventeen I Had No 'realism'.