March 15, 2021:
Narcissist know-it-alls who don't.
There are a handful of specialized, limited domains where it doesn't pay to argue with me. Computer-mediated narrative; literary Modernism and Postmodernism; Gnosticism; Plotinus, Pascal, Marx, Freud, Althusser. So that when one or another narcissist know-it-all wants to correct me when I note, say, the narrative implications of intertextual or "transworld" identity, it'll be a struggle for me to respond with patience.
I became cognizant of the pattern only late in life. I'm attracted to narcissists. Not to their narcissism itself, rather the charm they're many times capable of mustering in its service. A sucker for charm. It wasn't until late middle age I learned to discern the manipulativeness which charm sometimes implies. Masking the sometimes radical self-absorption it serves.
Once upon a time now long ago the original narcissist who inaugurated this pattern in my life parachuted in from the past for a weeklong visit. Sitting on my library floor with literally two shelves of scholarship on Gnosticism literally touching her back, arguing incorrectly but insistently over the ABCs. She has, you see, her own interpretation. One which serves her narcissist agenda but distorts and in many aspects rejects the origins and history of the current.
Later she wanted to argue the implications of transworld identity, the intertextual migration of fictional characters through multiple fictional worlds. By that time I tuned her out. For me, perhaps selfishly, there was no upside to the exchange. And more generally no reason to argue.
After her departure I ghosted her. It wasn't intentional. It was staring at the computer screen failing to arrive at positive things to say. Instead there was the voice of my dead mother: "If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all." Granted those seemed literally the alternatives, I chose nothing. That's impolite, but I felt paralyzed, and, truth to tell, I felt it wasn't then and isn't now important enough to struggle over.