Manliness

A passage from Neal Stephenson’s new book:

Neither of these men had much in the way of formal education, since each had decided, during his late teens, to simply go out into the world and begin doing something. And each of them had found his way from there, sometimes with good and sometimes with bad results. Consequently, neither had much in the way of money or prestige. But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women. But perhaps because of her background in refugee camps and the premature death of her mother, she could not bring herself to be interested in those men. This quality that she had seen in Peter and now saw in Csongor was — and she flinched from the word, but there seemed little point in trying to distance herself from it through layers of self-conscious irony — masculine.