"Nowadays men often feel that
their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within
their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this
feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly
aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which
they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes
of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and
remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely,
of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the
more trapped they seem to feel" (The Sociological
Imagination, 1959, p. 3).