Slow Learner

One makes the amazing discovery that grown adults walking around with college educations, wearing khaki and brass and charged with heavy-duty responsibilities, can in fact be idiots. And that working-class white hats, while in theory capable of idiocy, are much more apt to display competence, courage, humanity, wisdom, and other virtues associated, by the educated classes, with themselves.

My mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one.

I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.