Testosterone autism

 "With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes."

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This resonates with me, though I don't have the obsession with tools of WWII, I have gotten sucked into the biography thing and have had an ever harder time reading real novels, though I read more than a few and I do read a lot of mysteries. Somehow I think they don't count as novels. Case in point, I had trouble getting momentum in Tokarczuk's novel and even had to stop and read a mystery in the middle (Tana French's The Likeness). 

In the psychohistory of your average guy, I think this quote points to a condition somewhere between what I have characterized as Protruberance in earlier posts. That is, the tendency of young men to want to STAND OUT and insert themselves into situations, and the great scene from Moonstruck below, in which Olympia Dukakis asked why men chase women and John Mahoney says "because they fear death."

It's true. Men fear death. So we read about Historical Figures who have achieved Great Things and try to figure out how to get something similar done before we die. Squandering a chunk of little time it feels like we have left by ceding our attention to the consciousness of another person who doesn't even exist -- as we must when we read fiction -- takes discipline and an assuredness that we are OK as we are, without going out and doing Something Else, lest memory of us fade.