Looking to be normal

My appetite for knowledge has been driven by an incapacity to be normal, and a constant injunction to be so. I tried to learn, using books and my brain, how to be normal. The more I tried, the more I failed. I skipped from country to country, language to language, discipline to discipline, looking for that common ground of normality.I learned how to morph into various cultural norms, but found no normal. Instead, the bookshop and the library became like massage parlours: an intellectual stretching exercise, increasing my flexibility, rather than revealing any common truth. This may not be just a matter of my personal fabric, but the common experience of our generation.