Solitude is an excellent laboratory

Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others. My table manners are atrocious — in this respect I’ve slipped back hundreds of years; in fact, I have no manners whatsoever. If I feel like it, I eat with my fingers, or out of a can, or standing up — in other words, whichever is easiest. What’s left over, I just heave into the slop pail, close to my feet. Come to think of it, no reason why I shouldn’t. It’s rather a convenient way to eat; I seem to remember reading in Epicurus that a man living alone lives the life of a wolf.