I once received a flame email from a fellow St. Blogger who obviously considers herself an elitist, and who longed to instruct me whether I wanted to be instructed or not. She'd disapproved of a quiz I'd written about books and said that I was a middlebrow and that basically I should know my place. And it stung as the truth often does. But I recently read something in Myles Connolly's "Mr. Blue" that was interesting and somewhat consoling in regards to posing:
Most of us like to pose. And most of us when we pose are found out. And most of us, accordingly, suffer. Yet there is something to be said for posing. All poses reveal imagination. Some reveal vanity, to be sure, and some reveal humility. Every poseur does not deserve the black name of hypocrite. We meet a man who is playing at being hero or saint. The man may be tired of himself. He may know in his heart that he is not so good or great as he might be. His pose is an attempt at nobility. We laugh at him. But we are laughing at ourselves. It is because most of us are such poseurs to ourselves that we so readily find a poseur out.
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