The Thought-Riddled Nature

While intellectualism is not evil in itself, of course, it's my contention that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. Intellectuals have been among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of geniuses such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories - and especially those of Marx and Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic - fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s. While this had been largely quenched by 1972, the philosophies that inspired it, far from fading themselves, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever. Thence, they entered the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
However, I was never a true scholar like M******, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, I especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being "thought-riddled".
As a child I was extrovert to the point of hyperactivity but by the time of my late adolescence, I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal intensity. One of these was towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among sensitive artists and intellectuals, and may help to explain why so many of them have sought some form of escape from the complexities of their inner nature, even to the point of madness.
In my own quest for renown, I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic. It couldn't have differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social philosopher Max Weber, and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For Weber, the latter didn't so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it didn't, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God, mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the self.
To this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved...a narcissistic supply perhaps. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation? That's not to say that I wasn't a loving person, because I was; but precisely what kind of love was it that I spread so generously about me? One thing it wasn't was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13. In fact, it was a form so unacceptable to God that it would have seen me damned and in Hell had I actually managed to drink myself to death.
I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for me in the early '80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, M****** didn't like it when I drank to excess as if she'd already singled me out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.