Lipton’s Journal/January 26, 1955/279

Clues, mysteries, puns, double-entendres, jokes, paradoxes, affectations, secret societies, pompousness, word games, cross-word puzzles, charades are all folk expressions of the total violence done human nature for thousands of years. The H always peeps through the S, it is undeniable, it must express itself in no matter how tortured a form. The pompous man, the extraordinarily pompous man, is trying to teach people. He wears a mask which is the caricature of himself. Indeed one’s personality is always the caricature of oneself. So the pompous man is at bottom a loather of society, a potential destroyer. He is so bound to society that he cannot express himself in another way, but a part of him is always saying, “Look at me, look how ridiculous I am. If you are taken in by what I once believed, then you too will look like me, and will be able to teach only by driving people away.”