This, to a busy mind like his, was a truly deplorable situation; and had he not been a man of inflexible morals and regular habits, there would have been great danger of his taking to politics or drinking — both which pernicious vices we daily see men driven to by mere spleen and idleness.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

he had no affection left in his life — only the pitiful mockery of it in the camaraderie of vice.

Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;

his temper was so impetuous, his indolence so invincible, and his vicious habits so deeply rooted, that he made no progress.

He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.

Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it.

It occurred to him that perhaps all his life he had only been hearing echoes of himself, and that his morality, on which he had once prided himself, was merely a refusal to permit other people into his life.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom.

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.