I fancied myself as a teacher.
I was mostly a ham.
What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in—all this—and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture—forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.
Some people heard my mentors. Yes.
A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.
But others—oh, how rightly—saw me!
Yakkety-yak.
Wylie's next.
Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.
Christ Jesus!