DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS.

So two days ago, I went to the State Library in the city to do some research on misanthropy and hermeticism, as well as any other things about isolation and social seclusion that I could find. Although I picked out a few books, I didn't get around to going through all of them, and instead I leafed through one called "Hatred and Civility" by Christopher Lane. I didn't actually get much "research" done, since I was just skim reading, but I did manage to pick up a few quotes that broadened my thinking in terms of the way I'll write my story. I copied them down on a bit of paper because I didn't want to pay the 20c per page photocopying fee.

- "The novel [A Philantrophic Misanthope, by Joseph Somebody] sums up ideas that many Victorians inherited and transformed: love conceals misanthropy, and extreme hatred is a pathology marking a character for death."

- "Numerous Victorians believed 'public affections' and 'love of mankind' could trounce moral evil. But like those whose obsession with cleanliness compels them to unearth more and more dirt, they were pre-occupied by hatred and anxious to eliminate it.

Some bewailed 'the great mystery' of turpitude, fretting 'we cannot be in the enjoyment of good without the knowledge of evil'. Others realized that 'hatred of the old murderous kind' is not, as 'so many of our instructors would have us believe... entirely obsolete - killed by education, and intelligence, and what is known as 'deeper sympathy'."

- "The misanthrope is not merely different from other men. He perceives himself as the representative of a social ideal which others have betrayed, and condemns his fellows for their perversity and hypocrisy. And yet society abides, and it is the misanthrope who cannot fit. He is rigid and surly, a natural target for comic deflation."

- "Hating society, yet impelled to stay on its periphery, they discover that they just can't leave."

I also copied down some book titles to check out for more ideas:
- Monos and Daimonos - Bulwer

- The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad