I have nothing, nothing, nothing, tonight. I’ve been fairly productive this week, but I’ve felt as if I’ve been slogging through Redi-Mix every day. Depressed about Norway, I guess, plus a personal anniversary coming up that I’d just as soon ignore.

Anyway, First Thoughts comes to my rescue with this link–a masterful article from The Atlantic on Introversion, by Jonathan Rauch. Introversion is only one among my sparkling constellation of personality quirks, but I always like to see someone trying to raise the consciousness of all those extroverts out there, running around slapping people on the back and never meeting strangers.

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. “It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert,” write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.