Excellent Sheep

"The ability to engage in introspection, I suggested, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.  My students took this in for a second -- introspection, solitude, the life of the mind, things they probably had not been asked to think about before -- then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, 'So are you saying that we're all just, like, really excellent sheep?''  -- From Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz