How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

childhood. While he is on stilts he feels perfectly at ease, and indeed enjoys the admiration and comments of the passers-by who cannot understand his peculiar behaviour. Little by little the stilts have become an integral part of his life. They are the symbol of his security and superiority, and he cultivates them as if he were eternally committed to their use. The stilts, however, despite their effectiveness in bolstering up his self-esteem, are very inconvenient at times. Instead of riding in the tube to his work, he finds he must pay a great deal more to ride in a taxicab, as he cannot enter the train on his stilts. He has enormous difficulties with lifts, and wastes a great deal of time walking up endless flights of stairs because some lifts cannot accommodate him. At the theatre, which he enjoys, he is annoyed by the comments and jibes of some of the audience who ridicule his appearance as he walks into the foyer on his sticks. Certain very attractive jobs are closed to Mr. Q. because his stilts interfere with the conduct of his business. Finally Mr. Q. who has tolerated the ridicule of his fellows because of the inner satisfaction that his stilts vouchsafe him, meets a girl he would like to marry, but she refuses to marry him on stilts, and he feels he cannot dismount without becoming a prey to his old inferiority feeling. Complication follows complication in his life, and eventually Mr. Q. must isolate himself, eke out a bare and joyless existence, and depend largely on the mercies of his family. Although the case of Mr. Q. is a phantastic hypothetical case, the analogy fits all neurotics. Mr. Q. has chosen the device of stilts because he is afraid of the responsibility of competing with colleagues who are taller. One of his basic fallacies is that short stature is inconsistent with social usefulness. The stilts become a symbol of his physical and psychic apotheosis. Their continued use becomes a point of pride, and although he no longer knows why he uses them, he cannot relinquish them. He set certain artificial conditions to life, and