Flannery O’Connor Predicts The Internet Troll
Flannery O’Connor had possibly the keenest eye for the characters we meet in life. This passage struck me as either ahead of its time…or just timeless.
He had not done anything. He was twenty-eight now and, so far as she could see, nothing occupied him but trivia. He had the air of a person who is waiting for some big event and can’t start any work because it would only be interrupted.
Since he was always idle, she had thought that perhaps he wanted to be an artist or a philosopher or something, but this was not the case. He did not want to write anything with a name. He amused himself writing letters to people he did not know and to the newspapers. Under different names and using different personalities, he wrote to strangers.
It was a peculiar, small, contemptible vice. Her father and her grandfather had been moral men but they would have scorned small vices more than great ones. They knew who they were and what they owed to themselves. It was impossible to tell what Walter knew or what his views were on anything. He read books that had nothing to do with anything that mattered now.
Often she came behind him and found some strange underlined passage in a book he had left lying some-where and she would puzzle over it for days. One passage she found in a book he had left lying on the upstairs-bathroom floor stayed with her ominously.
