This short story is about having the wrong mindset. The main character reveals that he was born in a small town, in the home of a reverend, where all the rooms were clean and a “pathetic and old fashioned optimism” was the rule. The rhetoric was one specific to the pulpit, with words like: - Good and evil, beautiful and ugly The man hated those words because he felt that they are responsible for his sufferings. Life consisted exclusively of big words