Infinite Hope

He didn’t say any more,
But we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
And I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.
In consequence,
I’m inclined to reserve all judgments,
A habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,
And so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician,
Because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;
For the intimate revelations of young men,
Or at least the terms in which they express them,
Are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that,
As my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat,
A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.