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Category Archives: The Nature of Introversion

Introverts and Alcohol

I rather enjoy drinking alone.

And yes, I’m quite aware of the implications in our wider society.

Yes, my family has a history of alcoholism.

Yes, I drink most days of the week.

Already, many people might ask me questions about a river in Egypt.

By the standards of my birth culture, I am prime alcoholic material.

Alone, I love to have a beer or some wine with dinner. And then maybe some port, brandy, or sherry for dessert.

Alone on the hottest day of summer there’s nothing like a bottle of rose champagne poured over ice, paired with fresh, chilled nectarines and overripe mangoes.

In the autumn, there’s nothing like crisp hard cider, sweet porters, and bittersweet stouts served with ham, bacon, aged cheddar, and apples.

As the weather turns cold, there’s a special delight to be taken in fiery spirits like a good brandy or whiskey sipped straight while reclining by a fireplace.

I find that alcohol has the ability to carry the intimate imprint of a taste, a smell, a place better than any other substance.

I remember being amazed the first time I had a certain scotch from an island off the coast of northern Scotland. It tasted overwhelmingly of peat smoke and of the sea. It made me imagine myself sitting alone in a small, warm hut on a forbidding northern isle able to hear winds howling outside and waves crashing at the bottom of a rocky cliff…

I’ve watched the way extroverts drink and as far as I can tell, they don’t drink for any of the same reasons I do.

Classic extroverts tend to drink:
In unfamiliar public places with unfamiliar people – to deliberately lower inhibitions. Imbibing in excess gives a socially accepted excuse to misbehave and vent one’s pent up social repression. Alcohol becomes an attempt to escape from responsibility and even from the oppressive prison of oneself.
It doesn’t really matter what they drink so long as it gets them drunk. Generally, the more the taste of the alcohol can be masked(to encourage easy overindulgence) the better. If there’s a killer hangover, no problem. It will make a great story to tell one’s friends.

The Subtle person drinks in safe, comfortable places, in the home, with close friends and family, often alone. Imbibing in excess is unpleasant and unseemly.
The desirable effect is a relaxed, contemplative, spiritual state. To be content to sit and enjoy that wonderful feeling of just being alive, to read a book, or to write.
Not just any drink will do. It must be something that makes both body and soul feel good. While drinking…and afterwards.

This Subtle ethic is one that many mainstream people can’t understand. On the occasion I catch myself speaking of my fondness of good drink, I sometimes see a funny look on other people’s faces.
The main society offers two possibilities in this vein.

a. You’re a drunk.
b. You’re a snob.

How does a Subtle person convey the idea of alcohol as more of a sacred drug as opposed to a mere party drug or a crude tool to signal social status?
The narratives offered by the mainstream birth culture are a barren expanse with little to offer.
Imagine using ‘sacred’ and ‘alcohol’ in the same sentence in actual conversation!

Perhaps better just to drink alone, in the home, with intimates.

The Ritual of Unity

The outsider has a special place in the cosmology of the Accepted.

Within any community, there are always tensions, a friction of association that threatens to tear apart the social order.

Of all social rituals among the most important are those that deal with defusing these tensions.

In this respect, an outsider is an important part of the community by not being a part of it. Simply being ‘outside’ implicitly puts others ‘inside.’
The simple existence of an outsider puts the whole social world in perspective.

The shunning and persecution of the outsider, the other is the most powerful of all Rituals of Unity.
To carry out this ritual is to place in that one person all of those amassed woes of society.
And once this living effigy is constructed to symbolically burn it upon the altar of unity.

But it can’t just be any source of otherness, it has to be something sufficiently foreign, hate-able, and threatening. One has to earn it and be worthy of it.

After all, what has become of the United States without a Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia to inspire fear, drive everyone together, and resolve internal disputes for the good of all? The substitute sacrifices that have been offered up since then have been rejected by the Gods.
Without a fitting sacrifice for the Ritual, the society cannot be properly purified of its ills. The people must drift apart and squabble.

If you have often been that one person who just can’t seem to fit in, it behooves you to understand just who you are.
You are a demon, Ahriman, Satan, St. George’s dragon, that snarling little dwarf permanently lodged beneath Shiva’s foot, Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein… the embodiment of everything that tempts people away from their proper social roles and undermines the Correct order.

It is in part for this reason that I identify all Subtle things with shadow, darkness, the night, the moon, the underworld, chaos…

Once you understand your place, just who you are in their universe, there is a certain delicious delight to be taken in it.
And many things in our lives that seemed mysterious stand suddenly explained.

Extroverted Critic: “You Need to Be More eMOtional”

“Sometimes you need to let go man and just go with your eMOtions. You think too much.”
What Subtle person hasn’t spent years getting bombarded with this platitude?

The critic is usually well-meaning and just trying to help, but it gets old and comes across as patronizing.

It’s implicit in their advice that they, and outgoing people in general are superior emotional beings who feel more while I’m some sort of semi-automaton.
Why do they feel more? Because they talk about it more of course. And if one’s feelings are not talked about or otherwise put on display, they don’t exist, right? Truly the Loud ethic at work!

I’m appalled sometimes at the insensitivity of social normals. They expect me to explicitly verbally communicate every little thing to them. If they were the EQ geniuses they would have me believe, why are they utterly unable to read some pretty obvious non-verbal cues that indicate my mood, especially while they’re talking down to me? But somehow totally clueless, they keep prattling on.

What they do not realize:
‘Emotion’ means very different things in the sunny surface Loud world than in the Subtle shadow lands.

To your normal person who feels comfortable within the Accepted orthodoxy, emotion refers to the overpowering instinctual survival impulses, though they would not recognize them as such.
In other words:
They worship sheer intensity of feeling whatever that feeling it might be.
Look at the heroes through whom they live vicarious lives in film and fiction!
In their world, bigger is better.

True emotion, however, is more than just capricious passions.

It is distinguished first not by intensity, but by breadth and nuance. A single overwhelming emotion is like a plain lump of white sugar. A complex blend of understated, interrelated emotions that must be puzzled out through introspection, this is a chocolate mousse cake.

To one who is subtle, simply going out for a casual walk and lapsing into a contemplative state as the sun sets and the shadows grow long is a real emotional experience.

The thing we feel when experiencing mortal fear, obsession, or despair, or exultation is just a momentary rush. It puts us outside of our own self and overwhelms the faculties.
Recalled later whether fabulous or traumatic, it’s almost dream-like…never quite real.
We weren’t feeling it, it was feeling us.

Ultimately, the small thing felt intensely is more powerful than the large thing that consumes us. Because in so doing we develop a sense of self and grow closer to it. It makes one less a passive, reactive animal, more aware of what lies within.
Feeling in the Subtle way doesn’t just happen to us. It’s a capacity in oneself that must be nurtured and encouraged to flourish.

In short,
The Subtle emotion must be cultivated within humans, it makes us more powerful
The Loud emotion is common to all animals, it overwhelms us and forces us to submit.

This basic difference I think, is why I feel resentment when I am advised to be less analytical or get in touch with my emotions. If only they would understand! Not only do I feel deeply, but have a different understanding of what it is to feel. I often wonder how I would explain, only to subsequently realize that there’s no way I could do so within normal, acceptable conversation.
And having realized this, it’s almost as if they’ve slapped me in the face, while my hands are tied behind my back!
And there’s no way I can explain this to them either…

The Stuck Up Introvert

Introverts are notorious for seeming hostile, cold, and haughty to the extroverted majority.

This is the result of a simple misunderstanding.
And if extroverts understood just this one thing, they would be well on the way to explaining the introvert who stops them in their tracks and confuses them.

A people person does not understand the perspective of one who has received mainly negative reinforcement from the social environment.
Someone who isn’t socially able to keep up at the beginning tends to fall ever further behind.
A lesser degree of aptitude is compounded by missing out on necessary social learning from an early age.
Thus, bad things happen in social life seemingly without cause.
The whole social world is dangerous, capricious, and unpredictable. The weather changes without warning. Barbarian invasions come out of nowhere. The result is a xenophobic world view.
Most other people out there are foreigners. They value and desire different things. They speak a different language and live in another society.
The goal of social life is to co-exist with a minimum of conflict. Conflicts are a losing game when one is an ethnic minority of one. Social bonds are desirable and necessary, but first survival must be secured. Trust must be built before one can begin to lower their defenses.

Being on the defensive usually gets two responses:
-People ignore you (Desired result, defensive behavior reinforced.)
-People attack you (Fight or flight crisis, defensive behavior reinforced.)

A habitual defensive stance is interpreted:
-As a sign of weakness (an invitation to attack)
-As haughtiness and contempt (attack ensues)

This is social life in a nutshell for a good many introverts.

If you’re an extrovert: Imagine feeling as though it’s you against the world every time there’s any social conflict.
Imagine feeling like you’re about to be stripped naked before the entire world when a stranger pries with questions about your personal life.

If you can do this, you’ve just stepped into the world of that closed person who becomes irritable or confused when you’re just trying to be friendly.

There’s many frightening and confusing events in my own childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that now make perfect sense to me. The more I’ve learned, the more I realize just how ill equipped I was. Sometimes I think of how I could easily have done things differently, but there’s little reason to dwell on it too long. I couldn’t possibly have known what to do.
I’ve become socially proficient, but some things don’t change. I will always have to be on the defensive. Even when I’m comfortable and acting like a regular guy, I have to be consciously on guard against all sorts of old habits. Worst, unless there’s an extrovert friend there with me who I can talk to afterwards, I’ll never really know if I actually passed the test of belonging. I may have just been oblivious to my mistakes! This lingering uncertainty will always be there.

Introverts and the Military

The mentality of the military can be summed up by “One size fits all.”

What size will the one size be?

The size that fits most people.

If you are introverted, you already are not most people. If you are Subtle, you are among a few.

For people who would live beneath the bright Surface world, the military is among the worst of places to be.

The military favors loud people. Loud people make decisions. They might not be good decisions, but they can make a decision, even if someone is shooting at them.
That’s mainly what matters in the military.

The military is a place of order and obedience.
It does not matter why order is kept or who is deserving of obedience.
The cause does not matter. Nor does it matter if there is a cause.

If you are someone who likes to think, the military is your nemesis.
If you aspire to be a human being before a statistic, the military is not for you.
If you do not consider yourself one of the collective, it is inappropriate to volunteer your life for the sake of the collective.

Even if you are broke and starving it is best to avoid the military.
Even a gain in personal security is not worth the loss in time and personal freedom.
What good is security if one must atrophy?

Introverts and Night Clubs

Night clubs embody a mentality that is inimical to my own. That is exactly why I have been drawn to them on occasion.

To grow we all need challenges and changes. Putting oneself in an unfamiliar insecure place is a good way of doing so.

I hate all the latest pop music and dislike dancing to it even more, yet I would get myself out on the dance floor and experiment.

Strangely, I find there is a place for night clubs in the life of an introvert.
Night clubs are full of crowds so it’s like an arena full of bumper cars at an amusement park.
No matter how much you screw up, there’s no real consequences.
Short of threatening or physically assaulting someone, you can try what you like and see what happens.
You’ll make a fool of yourself again and again, but you’re a stranger. You’ll never again see all those other people.
You can keep trying and trying until you’re up to speed with everyone else.
At a night club, an introvert has that great ally of anonymity on their side.
Really, it’s not so different from posting articles online under silly pseudonyms such as “Gluon the Ferengi.”

You don’t even have to make a whole lot of conversation, the music is so damn loud most of the time that no one can really say anything except by shouting at the top of their lungs into each other’s ears. It really is reduced to raw chemistry.

For introverts who are behind in social development, bars and nightclubs can be a lifesaver. They are a place to remedy HID(Human Interaction Deficiency); it’s easy to satisfy the craving for physical contact with others. They are laboratories for scientific experiments in human social behavior.

Indeed, there’s no better place to take a starry-eyed romantic than a night club. In a night club, the reproductive market is laid bare. About 10% of men get most of the female attention. The rest of men struggle tooth and claw for the crumbs left over from the feast. Women get in free; men pay a cover charge. The currents of supply and demand reign supreme.
The lesson:
Women are valuable, the perpetuators of the species. Each is a bottleneck determining the potential for growth of the human population.
Men are cannon fodder, plain and simple. One man left alive after a slaughter can fertilize thousands of women.
But the top few men are the most valued humans of all.

Now, I have said before that I don’t consider myself to be one of the pickup artists. Their cynical, nihilistic ideas are a moral and intellectual dead end.
I don’t like the whole zero sum mentality of night clubs, but they do reveal our underlying instinctual drives and the social trends that must inevitably result.

If you observe one night in a night club you will understand why it is men who go to war and not women.
All those traditions that were simply handed down to us are suddenly explained.

Pickup artists embrace the nightclub mentality. As for me, going to clubs is a way of getting to know the enemy: ourselves.

If a Subtle person is to turn away from the surface world, they should first know what they turn from and why.
In night clubs, one can find the very quintessence of the Surface world. Everything you need to know to make a decision can be found there.

Ultimately I find:
The surface world has many privileges and pleasures, but is weak when it comes to meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.

Fulfillment is the greater good to me, even if happiness were the price. For the word ‘happiness’ in our modern language is just another of the pleasures.

Subsistence of the Soul

Builds Upon: Any Small Thing,
Introverts: Denizens of a Social Ghetto

Especially in youth, an extreme introvert feeling little commonality with the surrounding society must find ways to nourish the spirit even through the most trying times.  A life on the fringes is sink or swim.  You either find ways to take care of yourself or you just don’t make it.  To this day, I tend to be very reverential of food and intolerant of wasting any usable resources.  A subsistence survival sort of mentality got drilled into my head early on.  Though I never went hungry growing up, I’m the sort of person who likes to eat every last grain of rice or sop up the crumbs and juices left over from a meal with a piece of bread until my bowl is clean.  My stomach lurches when I see someone throwing out food.

Most people I meet dread the passing of time and aging.  I feel the passing of every day to be a gift, especially if it passed without too much trouble.  I will see having a white head of hair as accomplishment because I have a feeling of good fortune and privilege to make it even as far as I have.   My life has rarely been in serious physical danger, yet I feel I’ve had to claw every inch of the way out of stone.  I feel I’ve already been alive nearly forever yet most others consider me to be quite young.

This sort of mentality, this subsistence of the soul is an attitude that utterly baffles most people I encounter.  Rather, they find my actions strange because they know nothing of the code by which I act.   How would one even begin to explain face to face in a way that really made sense?  Would one want to if one could?

Do I really want to explain that every grain of rice, every red cent is another precious second of my life won from the birth society’s capricious standards and demands?

That I still make the most out of every grain of rice as I had to with every good feeling and happy moment?

That cultivating such reverence produces the sort of emotional rewards that make life worth living?

Though it could be tough to hold myself together in the worst times, I would find myself inspired to joy by things people around me didn’t even seem to notice.

Living with a lean soul has had its advantages.  I find I require far less than others around me to be content with life and therefore there are less things I fear losing.  I have an ongoing relationship with death in my everyday life while others postpone the very thought of it until telltale signs of aging can no longer be ignored or covered up with denial.

Most importantly, living by subsistence of the soul has the potential to teach one: fulfillment when distilled to its quintessence has very little to do with pleasure.

School As Introvert Prison Sentence

Leads To: Knowledge Monopolies: The University

I got pretty good grades in school.  Homework was easier for me than for most kids.  Yet as an adult it’s easy to look back and realize that none of that was important.  Once one gets into college it doesn’t matter.  Once one decides not to go to college it doesn’t matter.  We were told grades were important by all the authority figures, but it was a lie just to try keep us all in line for another day and to justify the system in which every one of us was trapped.

I look back on twelve years of schooling and can’t think of much beyond basic literacy that was truly important in the long run.  Even with literacy, my first reading lessons took place at home, not in school.  Classes at school did teach me useful things.  A lot of the classwork that was boring for other kids was pure fun for me.  Yet did it really need to consume 12 years of my life?  By the time we’re 18, the better part of our youth is irremediably spent on years of school.  Yes, humans have higher life expectancies now but the fact is we start our slide into aging soon after we hit biological adulthood.  With schooling, we get barely a decade to be active in the world at our peak.  People in past generations generally had begun adult-level activities by their early teens or even younger.  Now a college graduate at age 21 is only beginning to be functional in the adult world.  Is our increased life expectancy nearly as great when we have nearly a decade less in which to do things?

What is it all for?  One obvious purpose is the simple containment of youth who would otherwise be roaming around the streets all day.  With child labor laws, there’s nothing better to do than lock them up.   The result is a strange combination of minimum security prison and daycare.  It just doesn’t make much sense to the Subtle understanding.  To really ‘get’ the spirit of school it is most illuminating to examine the extroverted view and justification.

Every well-adjusted person I’ve talked to gives me the same message when I dare criticize compulsory education and public schooling.  “But it’s for socialization!”  Having tipped my ideological hand more than was wise, I end up with an earful of reminiscences about fun extra-curricular activities.  This always confounds me.  Whatever happened to the 7 hours a day sitting at a desk doing nothing?  That wasn’t fun!  It wasn’t particularly social either.

When I express desire for there to be some alternative from regular schooling, I get a blank stare for a second or two followed by “Your kid wouldn’t be able to develop properly.  He/she would be lonely and cut off.”  Every time I hear this ubiquitous answer, I pause for a few seconds before finding a way to just change the subject.

As an introvert in the system, I felt lonely and cut off.  I didn’t fit into the school society at all.  I was non-socialized in school.  I can pass as mostly normal now, but when I first graduated high school, I still had the social skills of a small child.  I’ve spent the last several years learning everything from scratch and I’m finally feeling as though I’m somewhat caught up.  I’ve been through several halfway houses, but I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m establishing a life for the first time after a long prison sentence.  I spent a good portion of that time, especially the later years in something akin to solitary confinement.

It took me a long time to figure out why extroverts assign such importance to collective schooling.  Every well-adjusted person seems to understand the reasons on some intuitive level but lack the ability to analyze their beliefs and articulate them.  I will do my best to translate the idea of ‘Socialization’ into Subtle-ese.

I gather that extroverts value schooling primarily for its ability to imbue millions of children with a common formative experience so that they may smoothly interrelate as adults.

This ability to relate to others is like being able to speak the same language.  It is one of the most critical things we’re supposed to learn.  It’s the base of belonging we need to be able to establish romantic relationships and find careers.  In Subtle terms, I suppose we could consider compulsory schools as a massive network of commonality factories.  In the Surface world, these factories are not idle or pointless, they are busily producing vitally important social commodities.

I think the idea of social adjustment helps explain why nerds are portrayed in popular culture as morally stunted, silly, contemptible, short-sighted, petty people who have missed everything that is really important in life.  The nerds were focusing on all the wrong things in school and they serve as  symbols of everything one should not become.  They are representative of defective units that were never properly calibrated despite the best efforts of the factory workers.  In the movies, nerds are rather unsympathetic characters because they usually rudely reject the efforts of well-adjusted people to save them.  The overall thesis:  social adjustment is open to everyone, but there will always be a few who insist on being self-destructive.

The truth that they never realize is that most people don’t ask for a clash with the system.  Some people are going to have the wrong configuration as they roll down the assembly line.  The standardized parts that seem to fit with most other people just don’t apply.  The true introvert frame reaches the end of the assembly line not only bare of all the necessary components, but dented and bent from going through a long series of incompatible processes.

When I tell a regular person that “School was awful.”  I am often met with agreement.  If the conversation goes on, it becomes clear that most of the perceived awfulness for the Surface person stemmed from completely different problems.  They don’t complain about homework or classes usually.  They talk about all their human relationships and ultimately how it was a time for social learning and tough lessons in human interaction.  From the way they talk about it, it doesn’t sound like it was awful at all.  Most of the time it seems they were having fun, but it got bad for awhile whenever  some conflict arose.  When I realized that this is their definition of  ‘awful’ it was clear there could be no bridging the gap.  In moments like that, it becomes clear we don’t even speak mutually intelligible languages and that we’ve lived our lives in separate universes.  I have difficulty explaining my experience precisely because I was never properly adjusted.

Negative Charisma

A friend of mine was once wondering what stats we would have if we were D and D characters.  We supposed we might have strengths of 12 or so and less than impressive dexterity.  When it came to charisma… My friend stopped and thought for a moment.  “You probably have negative charisma.” He concluded.  I definitely agreed with him.  Never in my life had I stood out and taken over a group of any kind.  Furthermore, I had a special talent for getting people to dislike me without any effort at all.  I’d look back and wonder what I’d done to piss them off.  Negative charisma seemed the best explanation.

Over time, I became better versed in social conventions but the idea of an opposite to the classic charismatic personality stuck with me.  I eventually started thinking of it as a virtue.  Something different than merely being disagreeable, something more than being the  sunny, charming, crowd pleaser that everyone seems to worship.

‘Beware the charismat’ I sometimes told myself.  It was a warning against the golden boy or girl of the hour who walks into the room and mesmerizes everyone.  A charismat is perfect in their mannerisms and dazzling in their conduct.  They are too good to be true, almost certainly disingenuous.  They lack the most important virtue: a flaw.  The charismat is the polished contrived sort of leader that thrives off of mass media in Western nations.

For a Subtle person, the most charismatic and inspirational people are those who act strange and awkward by the standards of Western society, who speak quietly rather than ostentatiously, who know how to share the stage rather than dominate, who know how to collaborate rather than compete.

A truly inspirational person does not conceal all their flaws and does not reveal all their strengths.  The inspirational person is calm, matter of fact,  never boastful, never sanctimonious, never patronizing.

To the Subtle  person, eccentricities are one of the most endearing elements of the human character and figure strongly into the personality of someone inspirational.

Negative Charisma is about substance over form.  A true introvert finds a speaker with a weak voice or a stammer to be inspirational if there is solid expertise, knowledge, and insight behind their words.  It is not about the means of delivery but the content delivered.

One who has negative charisma strives to be underestimated in order to select against those who understand only what is aggressively, outwardly flaunted.  It seemed to me that the fulfillment of one with negative charisma might come in a moment of vindication:  When the Golden person overextends, underestimates and is confronted by strength where they expected only weakness and submission as usual.  In such a moment, a charismat would be exposed with imperfections before their adoring crowd.  The first instance of resistance and refutation to the seemingly unstoppable force of their personality would break their power.   One with negative charisma would prevail as the Golden person was cast down by former worshipers.

Those with Negative Charisma never put themselves on a pedestal.  They never set out to be the strongest, best liked, most charming person.    They have no need to maintain a public image.  Their object is never to move all the crowd but to speak to the most thoughtful persons within  it.  The moment of vindication arrives when one who sits powerfully but precariously on the shoulders of a multitude throws their strength against one who is alone but immovable.

Extrovert Critic: “You Read Too Much”

Builds Upon: Rulers of Celephais,
Introverts vs. Extroverts: Learning

We’ve all heard this criticism.  We read too much.  When we’re seen reading, especially some subject material that seems uninteresting, we seem ‘out of touch,’ ‘with our head in the clouds,’ ‘on another planet.’

In general an introvert submerged in reading is perceived as trading the vibrant world around them for the dusty and colorless world of books.  The experience within books seems like a faded and flat flower pressing compared to the three dimensional, colorful, living flower.

To the extrovert, a book is a pale abstraction that crumbles away against the vitality of actual experience.  By extension, someone who spends considerable time reading is dry, abstract, lacking in personality, vigor, and practical knowledge.

To an introvert, however, there is nothing abstract, cold, or distant about habitual reading.  Rather than distracting from the surrounding world, it sheds light upon it and makes it richer.  For a Subtle person, the information found in books makes the experience of our world immeasurably more beautiful.  It allows us to reach back into time and through the wisdom of ages so that we may put our world into perspective.

Books allow us to perceive the wonders of our world through countless other people scattered across time, place, and circumstance.  To a subtle person, an extrovert lives in a very small pond indeed.  They understand their universe almost exclusively through a random handful of contemporaries.  That they see introverts as deprived is just a symptom of their ignorance.

A Loud person tends to perceive dead words on a page that yield a pale impression and nothing more.  Someone who focuses on all things on the Surface remains on the surface of things.    A Subtle person seamlessly moves beneath the dead words and into the pure meaning they represent.

To a Loud person, the content of books is dead, dry, fossilized information.  You get a can opener and open it up when you need it.

To the Subtle person, books are living streams of consciousness from other human beings in which we can actively participate.  It can be almost like becoming someone else for awhile, a way of freeing ourselves from our own lonely perspective and mental patterns. We are often accused of being selfish, yet we perhaps spend far less time living in the desires and thoughts of the self than do our extrovert critics.

An extrovert could respond that TV and film perform the function of allowing one to step into another’s shoes.  Surely these are more tangible, visceral mediums and therefore far more effective than a book.   After all, we empathize with the characters we see on screen and are drawn into a director’s vision.

However, books operate on another level because they demand active participation and voluntary shedding of our own perceptions.  Visual entertainment gives us the vision and all we have to do is sit back and watch.  There is not much participation, mostly just passive dictation to the viewer.  TV and film can be excellent ways of escaping our own world.  They offer a complete vision to replace our own.

The importance of books that extroverts tend to miss is that one must create the vision.  We must actively concentrate on adopting the thought patterns of another and seeing clearly through their eyes.  In books, we must actively bring our perspective in synchrony with another.  Thus we expand our own perspective rather than replacing it temporarily with someone else’s.   When reading a work of fiction, for instance, we must draw from our own experiences to bring alive the blueprint the author has set before us.   In trying to make the plan come to life, we are reshaping our own mind until we have a key that fits in the door to another mind.   The more we practice, the better we become at falling into the mental rhythm of another human being and escaping the confines of our own solitary vision of the world.  The fluid, multi-faceted understanding that results from reading is a source of incredible euphoria the equal of any of life’s greatest pleasures.

That an extrovert would consider us dead, absent, and isolated from the living world because of reading reveals their inability to see that the dry words on the page are merely a blueprint, an invitation to build something.  A something that never turns out the same for any two people who try it, or even for one person who builds from the same blueprint twice.

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