I had a strangely disturbing and bi-polar Kaspar Hauser-like upbringing in Haldane-hazed postwar New York that alternated in a modern stone-age way between cruel Dickensian bludgeoning and Socratic intellectual stimulation. (You can read all about it in my autobiography "The Son Also Writhes," Henry Holt, New York, 2003.)
One day my father scrawled on the wall in our tiny EIK (eat in kitchen) Polonius' advice to his son Laertes as writ by Shakespeare in "Hamlet."
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
We (my brother and I) were then beaten to the point of whimpering to discuss that advice for the next two weeks.
What's the fucking point, Geo? You ask.
Well,the fucking point is between clients,HR, office politics, et al trueness to thyself equals unemployment and perhaps large doses of state-administered thorazine.
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