Word: antiself
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...Clinton, of course, is a devious, unprincipled, opportunistic, promise-anything, craven, lying, manipulative antiself capable of any treachery in the service of his own ambitions. (They said the same thing about Franklin Roosevelt...
Bech Is Back concerns an obverse, almost perverse antiself. Henry Bech is Jewish; John Updike is Wasp. Bech suffers from a 13-year-old writer's block. Updike averages a book a year. Bech is an unathletic urbanite. Updike is an enthusiastic sportsman and a countryman. Once these disparities have been marked, the author is free to play with words, with personae, even with whole nations...
Lance Morrow's Essay on daydreams [June 28] illustrates a sad fact of modern life. Often we deny our most basic needs and desires by settling for second best. The antiself represents our true instincts before they are crushed by society and forced to retreat to the background...
...some reason, the more frivolous agitations of the collective antiself seem to have calmed down a little. Still, we walk around enveloped in it, like figures in the nimbus of their own ghosts on a television screen. Everything that we are not has a kind of evanescent being within us. We dream, and the dream is much of the definition of the true self. Last week Lena Home said that she has always imagined herself being a teacher. Norman Vincent Peale says fervently that he wanted to be a salesman-and of course that is, in a sense, what...
...antiself has a shadowy, ideal life of its own. It is always blessed (the antiself is the Grecian Urn of our personality) and yet it subtly matures as it runs a course parallel to our actual aging. The Hindu might think that the antiself is a premonition of the soul's next life. Perhaps. But in the last moment of this life, self and antiself may coalesce. It should be their parting duet to mutter together: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." -By Lance Morrow