“
It didn’t seem to him, though, on this morning in the Faraways, such an unfortunate thing, that kind of small-town determinism. True, he had himself clambered out of it as fast as he could and into the Great World seeking growing-room and air to breathe; but he had in fact languished in the city, not growing but shrinking over time into a strange form of invisibility. Almost no one that he’d known there knew anyone else he had known, and so to each new acquaintance Pierce was able to present a separate and partial character, an ad hoc personality specially adapted to the circumstances (bar, bookstore, Brooklyn) but too flimsy to support more than a single other person at close range…
—John Crowley, Solitudes
are you trying to tell us something ry?