Anonymous Comment on Impassioned Readers Post

I just got an anonymous comment on my post Impassioned Readers Lead Active Lives where he or she claims my final rhetorical question “Are you a vigorous actor on the stage of life engaged with the world of ideas?” wasn’t truly posed at the reader but was rather a veiled form of self-affirmation.

“Are you a vigorous actor on the stage of life engaged with the world of ideas?”

Oh please, Ben. You’ve got an incredible mind, and most of your blog entries are truly engaging and interesting to read, but this sentence is just a veiled form of self-affirmation. It has nothing to do with truly asking a question of the reader, and really only makes you come off as seeming insecure about yourself and whether reading so many books is truly a good thing to be doing with your time. If you truly were comfortable with being told by people to “break out of your shell”, you wouldn’t have to constantly keep defending just how “big and worldly” your shell is. You would just move on, knowing full well who you are, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and why your actions will speak for themselves in the long run. You don’t need to keep defending who you are.

I concede that it wasn’t a true question posed at readers, but rather a sign that I’m a sucker for eloquent rhetoric (the words appeared in the article) with a metaphor I’ve never heard before (actor on stage of life). I do suppose, however, that by including it in the way I did it came across as snooty, which I regret.