Youth: The Time of the Sincerely Insincere

What is the cause of all this show of strength and affectation? Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere. Some of that writing was, perhaps, the expression of unsatisfied or diverted sexual energy; some of it was due to a mistaken notion that one could write as a painter painted: the visual world made a violent impact on me. But I think now that the key reason is that I was beginning to suspect the tameness of my matter, and in a rather shady way was trying to make it more important than it was. I was “covering up.” The result is a strange mixture of the diffused, the strenuous, and the coy—but why? Because I had arrived at no settled view of life.