In Woolf's understanding, the term describes "a man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea"—a kind of hapless intellectual or artist who is lost in thought all the time, obsessed with life's great questions, and "wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life." A lowbrow, by contrast, denotes a person who is skilled at dealing with the logistics of every day survival