THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN NATION:
FRAGMENT III—"MY INTELLECTUAL LIFE, PART ONE"
FOOTNOTE 13
As an unconverted, Larsen of course saw Actaeon itself (and his being a part of it) as a failure, one reflecting a greater, macrocosmic failure, a failure of the cultural nation itself. To the converteds, however, this perception was completely different: they, too, saw failure, but for them, failure and its causes were always in other people, not in themselves. That perception—or myopia—helps explain the strange mixture in the converteds of a fiercely arrogant righteousness on the one hand and a blithe, shallow, almost solipsistic contentedness on the other. See Robert Pinckert's seminal work on the psychology of converteds from the Early Ante-Penultimate through the Late Penultimate (From Empiricism to Narcissism: A Nation of Unthinking Intellectuals, Beijing 2113). [Editor]
>>Return to text>>>