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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 7 (October 1, 1937.)

Which Type Do You Prefer? — Two Men Who Interest Me

Which Type Do You Prefer?
Two Men Who Interest Me.

Ted and Jim are brothers and they are good friends. And there the classing of them together ends. Ted spends his leisure going seasonally from one strenuous form of organized sport to another and filling any minutes that remain with joyous sociability. Jim keeps himself just as fit by walking (not organized tramps, but solitary and solid covering of ground); scorning the party spirit, he spends most of his time feeding an avid intellectual curiosity, concerning his own radiological field and advances in preventive and curative medicine generally. He is interested in minds as well as bodies, but in general terms. Any aspect of modern living, regarded broadly, such as new forms of the painter's and writer's art, radio and television as educative mediums, experiments in national socialism as opposed to pure socialism, attracts him. He is roused to study, analyse, synthesize and pigeon-hole them until the acquisition of further data.

But if his brother Ted were to run off with someone else's wife, if his sister announced that she was bringing her young family to make her home with him, if my cheeky young friend Jocelyn, were to try to start an outrageous flirtation with him, Jim wouldn&t be particularly interested in cause and effect, nor even in the phenomenon itself. Probably such human idiosyncrasies would merely trouble his high calm with a passing wave of irritation.

Have you grasped them? Ted, bronzed, friendly, ready for anything the crowd is ready for; Jim, rather remote, partly from choice and partly because the very clarity of his intellectual processes frightens the ordinary mortal who prefers “fluffy” thinking which leaves the environment warmly hazy.

There you have them! Jim piques one's curiosity. Ted is there for all the world to see. I know which one I prefer to be with, and which one would be more sympathetic in misfortune. But I also know that only one of them is likely to make any permanent contribution to the good of humanity—as a whole and speaking generally.