The Intellectual Tapeworms

There are two groups between which it is hard to distinguish on the margin. The first is the group which is so frightfully advanced, ready to prove it with an impressive stream of misunderstood quotations from authorities who suit them. Such people swarm in coffee bars at the slightest chance to be daring when there's no risk involved, ever ready to attack someone else's point of view, believing that it's the things to believe nothings.

The second are the party types, desperately keen to be popular, and generally ready to gossip with anybody about anything.

These two varieties are perhaps the hardest to put up with Apparently bereft of all vision of the future, happy to be intellectual tapeworms in an ideal climate with a perpetual source of partially digested food, not needing to grow a shell for protection because their very way of life postulates the absence of anything from which they need to be protected.

In contrast to both these groups, there exist the students who seem to want to be unpopular, always taking the contrary view and not particularly keen to do anything for anybody. Such people irritate, if only because they earn respect. They invariable have something stimulating to say and have a weird capacity to find corners of irrationality in other people's mind.