ing to find security by
just holding on to one false straw after another. I prefer to hope and
to trust, and, although it is a dreary philosophy, I could not, if I
would, exchange it for something which is false, however wonderful and
beautiful.

_On Reality in People_

My one great grievance against people in the mass is that they are so
very seldom real. I don't mean to say, of course, that you can walk
through them like ghosts, or that, if they "gave you one straight from
the shoulder," you wouldn't get a black eye. But what I mean is, that
they are so very rarely their true selves; they so very rarely say what
they think--or indeed think anything at all! They are so very rarely
content to be merely human beings, and not some kind of walking-waxwork
figure with a gramophone record inside them speaking the opinions which
do not belong to them, but to some mysterious "authority" whom it is
the correct thing to quote. Have you ever watched the eyes of friends
talking together? I don't mean friends who are _real_ friends, friends
with whom every thought is a thought shared--but the kind of familiar
acquaintance who passes for a friend in polite society, and passes out
of one's life as little missed in reality as an arm-chair which has
gone to be repaired. In their eyes there is rarely any "answering
light"--just a cold, glassy kind of surface, which says nothing and is
as unsympathetic and as unfamiliar as a holland blind. You can tell by
their expression that, in spite of all their apparent air of friendly
familiarity, they are merely talking for talking's sake, merely being
friendly for the sake of friendship; that, if they were never to see
each other again, they would do so without one heartbreak. Perhaps I
am unsociable, perhaps I am a bit of a misanthrope; but those kind of
friends, those kind of people, bore me unutterably. I am only really
happy in the society of bosom friends, or in the society of interesting
strangers. The half-and-halves, the people who claim friendship
because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly
frequently--and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an
excellent cook--these people press upon my spirit like a
strait-waistcoat. I gabble the conventional small-talk of polite
sociability, and I thank God when they are gone! They are called
"friends," but we have absolutely nothing in common--not even a disease!

So much polite conversation is mer