People
He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become as wise at sixty as he thought himself at twenty.
— Mary Wilson Little
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
Sixteen hours of daily study might eventually bring someone up to the wisdom they already believed they had at twenty. That is the sting: youthful confidence gets an enormous head start on experience. The long, demanding education becomes a way of catching up with an inflated self-image.
Context reviewed