Every Man Fights a Battle with Pride and Ignorance

He had consumed life, meaning to get started; he had played false and, perfectly pleased, bought into a scam. He followed the news; he floated like a sea duck with the crowd. The momentum of activity lulled him. The Bugle Call and the Post-Intelligencer endorsed it as real, this sheer witless motion and change.... He had burrowed into the whirling scheme of things; he had hitched himself to the high school men and the real estate partners, to the ever growing town and immortal nation and its sensations, events, and shared opinions. He had lost the fight with vainglory, the fight with ignorance, for what he now guessed must be the usual reason: he had not known there was a fight on. 

—Annie Dillard, The Living