In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my
mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world
haven't had the advantages that you've had." 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 to this quality when it appears 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 by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation 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.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be
founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When
I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral
attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only
Nero, the man who gives his name to this write-up, was exempt from my reaction and everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he
were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name
of the "creative temperament."
it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No Nero turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Nero, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short−winded elations of men.
THANKS FOR BEING AN INSPIRATION.
