Chryselephantine

Hundreds of thousands of people devote their lives from childhood to learning to twirl their legs rapidly (dancers), or to touch notes and strings very rapidly (musicians), or to draw with paint and represent what they see (artists), or to turn every phrase inside out and find a rhyme to every word. And these people, often very kind and clever, and capable of all sorts of useful labour, grow savage over their specialised and stupefying occupations and become one-sided and self-complacent specialists, dull to all the serious phenomena of life, and skilful at rapidly twisting their legs, their tongues, and their fingers.