My Alibis #3

"The talk about early and late maturers, seldom free of the death-wish for the former, is specious. He who matures early lives in anticipation.... Such anticipation, saturated, as it were, with itself, withdraws from the outer world and infuses its relation to it with the colour of neurotic playfulness... Painfully he must win for the relation to objects the space that is occupied with his imagination: even suffering he has to learn. Contact with the non-self, which in the alleged late-maturer is scarcely ever disturbed from within, becomes for the early-maturer an urgent need. The narcissistic direction of his impulses, indicated by the preponderance of imagination in his experiences, positively delays his maturing. Only later does he live through, in their crude violence, situations, fears, passions, that had been greatly softened in imagination, and they change, in conflict with his narcissism, into a consuming sickness... In their inner economy, unconsciously but implacably, the punishment is meted out that has always been thought their due."
--Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia