Obtuseness was its own defense.

Why did I submit myself to the butchery of the trenches when I might have served in the echelons as a medical officer? Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Doctor Freud would suggest that I was pursuing a death wish.

The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.

Indeed, my first interest in the pioneer work of Doctor Freud sprang, not from a concern for persons wounded in their collisions with reality, but from my personal curiosity about the nature of creativity and the springs of motivation. So.

It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker.

But he could feel nothing but disdain for the artificial class of the merchant, who sucks up his living through buying and selling things he does not create, who collects power and wealth out of proportion to his discrimination, and who is responsible for all that is kitsch, for all that is change without progress, for all that is consumption without use.

Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.

You can gain experience, if you are careful to avoid empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience–twenty times. And never resent the advantage of experience your elders have. Recall that they have paid for this experience in the coin of life, and have emptied a purse that cannot be refilled.

Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.

But I was a polite kid, so I went. Even the wildest and toughest of us kids, several of whom ended up in prison and one on death row, would be accounted polite by today’s standards.