The Abnormal MInd of Oneself

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  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,
or a hostile levity when I realized some unmistakable sign an intimate 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. pg.5