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"right" that people are worthless; but they did not write a "talk to the little man."* I'd rather be wrong and learn from experience. My controversies with conventional thinking and lifestyles are apparently a part of my research. If unarmored life intends to revamp its modes of existence, it will have to develop them organically while struggling to free itself from traditions. While doing this it is damned hard to keep one's own emotional sensory apparatus pure. To stay in touch with the old way of life and protect oneself from it, while developing the new and keeping it alive, is a damned hard job. 1 December 1946
Other people have a lot of time for diplomacy. I have neither the time nor the ability. This is why it is so difficult for me to make progress. Granted, in the end I will win out, but with what a staggering effort. Other people sway like reeds in the wind as soon as a magnet comes near them. But I do not want to attract them to myself in that way. I want them as independent individuals who join me in a common effort. I have completed the talk to the little man. It's as if a weight had fallen from me. I have freed myself from my irrational attachment to the little man without becoming reactionary. I have separated his human from his inhuman qualities. When I look back over the past thirty years, I am amazed that I have circumnavigated hundreds of rocks unharmed. Each rock was the "good advice" of some "well-meaning" friend. Under the guise of being concerned about me or my work, they looked after their own shortsighted peace of mind. Thus I resisted the advice to marry rich when I was twenty-two years old the advice "not to be so aggressive" the advice not to take everything so seriously *Listen, Little Man! (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974).