The prig never learns anything unconsciously or instinctively. He learns only what he feels is worth learning; anything else he no...t only scorns but fears, or regards as compromise, contamination, deterioration. Your prig lives in a kind of many-windowed, not to say entirely glassed-in, dwelling, bathed in a prim religious light; but the windows themselves he never opens, for fear that something may blow in from the street. He wants light without air, he prefers purity to humanity, in all too many cases the campus to the cosmos. He is the most complacent of men, where the snob will often be the most worried; and he is not, like the snob, observant, so he is not, like the snob, adaptable. He is rigid equally by temperament and by training--rigid in all big ways, where the snob is only in small. For the snob, at his Proust-like task of studying the great world, there may be only one place to go for neckties; for the prig there is only one way of going to heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter.... To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous do...g, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and, to wind up, with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming,... that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »