Two (Miltonic?) dilemmas

For the last couple of years, Miltonista has felt like he's been going through some sort of transition from young to full-blown adulthood--a second, less physiologically dramatic puberty. This transition has been marked by two rather banal but nonetheless acute problems. As a narcissistic reader, I can't help but think these are somehow Miltonic problems*.

1. I'm intensely social (I grew up as a latchkey only child, so I think I've spent enough time alone for a lifetime already), but I increasingly find the great majority of people intolerable, their conversation maddeningly inane or worse. Five, six, seven years ago, I was far more tolerant, willing to hang out with people whose company I didn't necessarily enjoy all that much just for the sake of socializing. I still succumb to this impulse now and then, but I've discovered that I tend more or less to shut down when I'm surrounded by people I'd rather not be around.

This is clearly related to my second dilemma.

2. I admire generous thinkers--people who really have a knack for seeing how others think. Despite his eccentric and deeply ingrained mode of thought, my advisor is just such a generous thinker. I've come to believe that he can, more or less, anticipate how I'll react to a certain text or idea; even though he doesn't really agree with me on fundamental points, he's come to see how I think and even to value some of the outcomes. Unfortunately, I find generosity of mind a struggle to maintain. I'm not necessarily a dogmatist--methodologically, for example, I'm mostly an ad hoc poacher--but I find it increasingly difficult to accommodate positions and perspectives that are opposed to my own (unless they happen to be articulated so brilliantly that they blow mine out of the water).

Maybe all of this merely means that I'm growing into the sad, tired role of cranky elitist. Let's just hope I don't go blind.

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* - In the case of #2 above, for example, Milton is the capacious thinker who believed in the benefit of disagreement (Truth as Osiris, etc.) and could cherish the intellectual camaraderie of Roman Catholics on the Continent. He's also a petulant, dismissive polemicist. The trick, I suppose, is figuring out what the relationship between these two habits really are: youth vs. age, two sides of the same dialectical coin, occasional strategies, etc.