"What is so defeating is this everlasting good-spiritedness, the application of enthusiasm against loneliness. The expression of the force that seeks to go with the grain--actually to become the grain--is, everlastingly, a smile. But the smile is a lie, and it makes people glum. And the glumness then flows against the grain, being confident of its bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile. In our time, nearly all art has been made from glumness and has had very little to do with power, because it feeds on this tiny bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile.
It's so little to feed on. That little bit of truth. Feed on it only and you go mad. Nourished by just that little truth, how can you have strength to resist your enemies? The smile, for instance?
How lonely white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to die their hair green. They thought they would have both things: the flow of history, because they knew history; and the edge, because they had talent. But history belongs to children, and the edge belongs to adolescents, so they have neither. What they have is a kind of superior whining, and the one freedom they have been able to make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint. So this is what they inhabit now: a tiny space where they struggle toward a sense of history and a sense of edge by refining their whimpers."
-George W.S. Trow Within the Context of No Context
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