"Humility Overrated" (or, "Sartre's on My Side")

[claracter]

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when

Comments

[h2ly]

Claire~
I love this essay. I could see both side of me in it. The me that thinks by talking and the me that dislikes explaining complicated things because talking takes thrice as much energy and time as thinking. May be that's why I'm somewhere in the middle.

I was wondering if I could post this article on my site?

[claracter]

I am pleased, Ly, that you enjoyed the article. As someone who is introverted but not misanthropic, I definitely found it amusing and astute. (Though it is, admittedly, rather self-congratulatory to think of oneself as inherently more socially suave and sophisticated simply because also reserved. Having heard, from childhood, that insatiable addiction to people called extroversion praised to the skies, it is relieving to be assured that not all people consider the need for privacy a human defect!)

I would not at all mind if you posted the article, Ly; I think it is the sort of thing that should be passed around like an infectious disease! I wonder how you, being of such unique cultural conditioning and exposure, read it differently than the run-of-the-mill industrialized Westerner?