"I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off"
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Self-portrait as indictment: Nock opens by borrowing the voice of rumor ("I am said") to frame his aloofness as public evidence rather than private confession. It is a sly move for a philosopher who spent his career distrusting mass opinion and the social machinery that manufactures it. The sentence is almost bureaucratic in its precision, a miniature dossier on his interpersonal failures, which is part of the point: he catalogues himself the way institutions catalogue people, then quietly refuses to perform the remedial charm expected of him.
The key phrase is "unwilling to meet any one half way". In ordinary speech it reads as stubbornness. In Nock's universe, it signals a principled refusal to bargain down intellectual standards for the sake of conviviality. His "easy, not diffident" manner denies the usual excuse for distance (shyness). This isn't anxiety; it's selection. "Formal and unresponsive" turns coldness into a kind of etiquette, a controlled surface designed to prevent the premature intimacy that social life often treats as a moral obligation.
The subtext is defensive but not apologetic. Nock implies that people want access more than understanding, and that warmth is frequently demanded as a credential of sincerity. By admitting he "tend[s] constantly to hold people off", he reframes social failure as strategy: an insulation layer against the noisy, coercive expectations of community, politics, and small talk. Contextually, it fits a writer skeptical of the State and of popular culture's pressure to belong; the pose of difficult acquaintance becomes an argument about freedom, rendered as temperament.
The key phrase is "unwilling to meet any one half way". In ordinary speech it reads as stubbornness. In Nock's universe, it signals a principled refusal to bargain down intellectual standards for the sake of conviviality. His "easy, not diffident" manner denies the usual excuse for distance (shyness). This isn't anxiety; it's selection. "Formal and unresponsive" turns coldness into a kind of etiquette, a controlled surface designed to prevent the premature intimacy that social life often treats as a moral obligation.
The subtext is defensive but not apologetic. Nock implies that people want access more than understanding, and that warmth is frequently demanded as a credential of sincerity. By admitting he "tend[s] constantly to hold people off", he reframes social failure as strategy: an insulation layer against the noisy, coercive expectations of community, politics, and small talk. Contextually, it fits a writer skeptical of the State and of popular culture's pressure to belong; the pose of difficult acquaintance becomes an argument about freedom, rendered as temperament.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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