1. The introspective personality is no more of a unit than any
other type. Intelligence, energy and a host of other matters play
their part in the sum total of the character here as elsewhere.
H. I. is what might be called the intellectual introspective
personality. From the very earliest days he became interested in
himself as a thinker. "How do my words mean anything?" he asked
of his perplexed father at the investigative age of five. "Where
do my thoughts go to when I do not think them?" was the problem
he floored a learned uncle with a year later. This type of
curiosity is not uncommon in children; in fact, it is the
conventionality and laziness of the elders that stops children in
their study of the fundamentals. H. was not stopped, for the zeal
of his interest was heightened as time went on.
He played with other boys but early found their conclusions and
discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading
incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted,
for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's
interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was
noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten
life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one
current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the
other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply,
fascinatingly interesting. It seemed to H. I. that there were
"two I's, one of which sat just over my head and looking down on
the other I, watching its strivings, its emotions, its thoughts
with a detached and yet palpitating interest. When I watched the
other boys at play I wondered whether they too had this dual
existence, whether they chewed the cud of life over and over
again as I did."
Came puberty with the great sex passions. The vibrating life
within him suddenly became tinged with new interests. One day at
a party a vixen of a girl threw herself boldly in his arms and
tried to push him into a chair. The bodily contact and the swift
bodily reaction threw him into a panic, for the passion that was
aroused was so powerful that he seemed to himself stripped of all
thought and reflection and impelled to actions against which he
rebelled. For he was fully acquainted, at second hand, with sex;
he knew boys and girls who had made excursions into its most
intimate practices and despised them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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