The devil thinks a condo will make him feel normal. Or at least make him happy. Maybe it will.
He is a “little” devil so I pictured him doing little devil things. Dropping pianos on peoples heads always happens in cartoons and slapstick movies.
Half remembered quote from Freud or someone:
“Tragedy is when a piano falls on someone’s head and they die. Comedy is when a piano falls on someone’s head and they get up and walk away.”
Another way I see it is he wants more from his life, to be someone better. He doesn’t just want to do the dirty work that little devils have to do, cause mischief and such. Deep down, unknown to even himself, he wants to move up to be a varsity devil.
No matter how many times he googles his aliments, he’s always still a devil. There isn’t really anything wrong with him. He’s just who he is, which for him means there is something wrong with him. He hates himself.
Click Here To Get His Diagnosis
These are the devil’s symptoms. To me the list of side effects on drug commercials is poetry, so I wanted to mimic that. The first symptom I wanted to be something common that anyone could have. The next one, something that would be less common and is more likely a devil symptom. The last one is a half remembered line from Walker Percy. Some character suffered from excessive longing or something to that effect. It seemed perfect for a devil symptom, particularly this devil.
Years of intense hypochondria – googling symptoms becomes a daily activity. Even after going to doctors you still google symptoms. Illness can become an identity. A way to deny the reality that you are fine now but will not be forever. If you have xyz disease then you can get treatment and delay the inevitable. “At least I know what’s wrong with me. What’s the worst is not knowing,” said someone somewhere. The deeper malady is always existential.
This is a poem I just wrote:
Call Your Doctor if Symptoms Persist
Loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities
Lack of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli
Distinct quality of mood (unlike normal sadness)
Morning worsening of mood
Early morning waking
Psychomotor agitation or retardation
Significant anorexia or weight loss
Excessive guilt
Marked loss of libido
Loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities
Lack of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli
Distinct quality of mood (unlike normal sadness)
Morning worsening of mood
Early morning waking
I used to know a girl from the Czech Republic. She lived in Mississippi for years and was book smart but never quite mastered plain English. Many times she would say things that had an honest poetry to them. A friend installed a hook in his house to hang his bikes. She said, “Those bikes hang like they are dead.” I asked her to tell me a story when I was drunk on a couch, a fable from the Czech Republic to put me to sleep. It started, “There once was a little devil who did not want to be a devil anymore.” I don’t remember the rest of it.
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The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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The correct Latin phrase is reductio ad absurdum,“reduced to absurdity.” The phrase refers to a classical rhetorical mode of refutation, by which one shows that another’s arguments, if followed far enough, lead to an absurd conclusion. To Mr Compson, time reduces human experience to absurdity because all life concludes with death.The incorrect phrasing may be a joke on either Mr Compson’s or Quentin’s part; or along with the hyphen in “excruciating-ly, ” the mis-stated Latin could hint that Quentin remembers Mr Compson as drunk and not in full command of his words. (A Faulkner Glossary)
Mister Compson is not simply passing along the watch, he is passing on a piece of the family, an symbolic heirloom. But he is also passing on the burden of the family, the fatalism and despair at the loss of a culture in a war that was cursed by the horror of slavery. The price for the sin of slavery is to never again regain fully the honor of the old society and to bear the weight and guilt of all that that entails. In a narrow sense Faulkner’s work is a eulogy of the Old South. A coming to terms with what that means – what the South could have been but also at the same time, paradoxically, could never have been. It is a form of psychosis. Madness. To lose your way of life in a war in any moral or spiritual sense you were unquestionably on the wrong side of can cause insanity. As his father does, so does Quentin. The final line of Absalom Absalom! is spoken by Quentin though it could be a summation of Faulkner’s portrayal of the Southern male complex. He says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t hate it.” Even Southern man at this late of date with some maturity arrive at that conclusion. They can’t love the South, embrace everything it stands for and stood for, but they don’t hate it.
Reductio ad absurdum is not a rhetorical mode of refutation. It is a mode of refutation.
this has nothing to do with slavery