A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest.

Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

(He is continually starting these self-improvement projects: sometimes it’s memory training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.)

the overpowering sloth of sadness

(There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don’t we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought

Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.

Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.

While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.…”

pylorus