In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind
ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,
‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had
the advantages that you’ve had.’
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he
meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim
of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young
men or at least the terms in which they express them are
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still
a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense
of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at
birth.