self discovery can come from anywhere

Part the First

Rob has always vascillated between clean, Hemingwayesque prose and pseudo-Faulknerian grandiloquence.  Read here for more of his most ponderous, sentimental and high-falutin' musings. If you're lucky, he may blather on about how the country is changing for the worse, how there has been a decline in good manners and a rise in horrendous crimes, how people nowadays ''dont have no respect for the law -- -- dont even think about the law.''

''Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam,'' Rob observes, ''the end is pretty much in sight.''

Part the Second

Perhaps, but he may also be an especially representative kind of idiot. His plight, after all, is - for people of his age and background - a familiar one: an alienation from his own experience brought about by too much knowledge, too many easy, inconsequential choices, too much self-consciousness. Bred in a culture consecrated to the entitled primacy of the individual, he discovers that he lacks a self, a coherent identity, maybe a soul. He feels that he could be anyone. "It wasn't very unusual for me to lie awake at night," he confesses, "feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it."