Some recent tasty reads. This quote is from "The Education of Henry Adams" concerning a friend of his father:
Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman, professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian, he yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall or the Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the opposite; he affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust, but he might have said what his lifelong friend William M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do."In O'Neill's novel "Netherland", he spoofs Bush haters who seem to have psychologically longed for an Iraq War in order to test their anti-war verbal fighting ability, just as it's often said that many young men long to test their courage in actual war:
For those under the age of forty-five it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment — or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers.Elsewhere:
"Hans, you’re supposed to be the great rationalist.” As I’ve said, I never laid claim to this trait. I merely saw myself as cautious about my pronouncements. The idea that I was a rationalist was one Rachel had nurtured—albeit, I must admit, with my complicity. Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?Another:
One recipient of this missive copied his reply to all of Chuck’s addressees:One more:WhoeverAlthough I glanced at them, I didn’t respond to Chuck’s communications. My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness.
Could you please stop sending me crazy junk mail?!
But I was also drawn to Chuck. I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men, almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents, who slip out of bed in the middle of the night to pitch to a pajama’d reflection in a windowpane. I’ve never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I’m an analyst—a bystander. I lack entrepreneurial wistfulness. In other respects, of course, I’m as faraway as they come.
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