Word: thoughtfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...soon as Betty left, Martin's head began to reel again. Everything became distorted; he fell down four times just walking back to his room. He thought he was going crazy, for now he was having one of his dreams in the daytime. He was an earthworm, burrowing through a telephone cord into the receiver: Betty was in the other part of the telephone, and he was getting closer and closer to the receiver there, and something was about to happen-but before it could, he would see pictures, wildly distorted, of his old biology book's photographs...
...perceiving, interpreting their surroundings so subjectively that their reactions or lack of reaction mystified onlookers. "A friend of mine failed a course he had worked his guts out on," one boy recounted. "When I heard, I roared with laughter and the people around me were shocked. They thought I was being spiteful, but really I was happy because now my friend would have to be closer to me. He had been forced to realize-as I already had-that however hard you try, it doesn't make any difference." A Cliffie said, "I wrapped myself in a cocoon and shut...
...scale of conversation levels. But there is another dimension to communication, where mutuality is almost impossible to achieve, he said. That is intimacy, an "ultimate intimacy not obtained by shared confessions of guilts, ambitions, Oedipus complexes, or secrets," but a mental unification analogous to sexual intercourse, a joining of thought processes so total that the listener could just as easily be the speaker. In short one gets inside the other's head...
...Even those who continued to present a normal facade to friends felt increasingly isolated. Two of the Cliffies interviewed said they dated a lot. One said, "I went out so much that other girls were jealous of me. But they didn't know how lonely I was. Once I thought of myself lying asleep and I laughed. I thought, 'Poor girl, nobody cares about you and you're not even awake enough to care about yourself...
...snot in my mouth." For some there was an irritating sense of disconnection, a feeling that while their parts were being microscopically examined, they were wasting their present lives and shortchanging their futures. "Once someone gave me a CRIMSON," one boy said, "and I was panic-stricken at the thought of all the time I was losing, and all the things I was missing...