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Originally Posted by gmw
In that paragraph about new people he says: "But, aged twenty, I could only see what was being lost." This is an explicit message to the reader: I can see it differently now. (The reader gets a similar explanation with regard to the arguments with his father.) There was nothing similar in the opening pages. I wasn't looking for a grovelling apology, just a hint that our narrator was aware of the impropriety of his behaviour as a 13yo. This was the opening of the book - the closest it gets to an introduction - so I think the reader is entitled to a little bit of direction if things are other than they seem.
That the author gives us such direction later and for other things suggests they are not that way in the opening. Everything he does and says through the book seems to try and affirm the "we are different" message in the opening - even, it seemed to me, if he had to turn his head away to make sure he never saw anything that upset his worldview. When he begrudgingly went back to school, he seems to deliberately avoid the company of those that might spoil the picture he had built for himself. He never opens himself to the possibility that there are others out there recognisably the same as he without being connected to the Lake District, and that there are others that are different but whose value does not depend only on what they can contribute to the Late District. I found his perpetual isolationism very wearing.
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Well, my ebook starts chapter 1 on page 14. Chapter 3 on page 18 and following says:
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Later, I would read books and observe the other Lake District, and begin to understand it better. ... Above all, I learned that we are not the only ones who love this place.
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How is that section, in the opening pages, not an acknowledgement of a different way of understanding things? And I think he was perfectly well aware of his bad behaviour at the age of 13.
As for the criticism of his "perpetual isolationism" in writing about his life and the life of his family and the other farmers of the area: well, surely that's what he was setting out to do, and I can't see anything wrong with that. He was writing about what he knows, as is only to be expected in a memoir.