Word: devil
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Mailer admirably settled in years ago for the literary long haul. Whatever momentary noise he made as the Tasmanian devil of American letters (when he would go dervishing through the culture, talking tough, chewing the furniture), his 27 books have drawn a permanent and distinctive trajectory. His obsessions usually lead back into the continuum of the 1950s and '60s, into the universe of the cold war, of media metastasis and dangerous fame, of glamorous, conspiratorial violence, of the garish existential dreads and lusts (to use the old hyperthyroid Mailer vocabulary) that it has been his gift to conjure...
...demon. My self-absorbed, sexist husband just won't let me go. He buried my ashes under the hazelnut tree and hasn't stopped mourning since the Carter administration. Now he's sold his soul to the devil to get an interactive CD-ROM to beam me out of my comfortable one-bedroom in Purgatory. He's such an asshole. What should I say to him when I see him? Should I bring up our earthly marital problems? Should I dress as Helen of Troy? Help me, Norma, what's a girl to do? Perturbed in Pudding Purgatory...
Obviously there have been huge improvements. Lead, for instance, slows mental and physical development in children. The increasing use of lead-free gasoline around the world vastly reduces these ills. But banning leaded gas is a regulation, and REGULATION, as conservatives know, is what the Devil has printed on his T shirt. So lawmakers clamor for a risk-assessment bill that could be used (among other mischief) to end the phase-out of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Dollar benefits of regulations must justify dollar costs. Fine. Sounds good. But how do you measure the dollar benefit of brighter first-graders...
...natural objects as forests, rivers and mountains. Consider, for example, the Alps. To sobersided moderns, these vast, snowy protuberances are no more than vertically enhanced scenery--awesome to be sure, but devoid of greater meaning. Earlier generations were more impressionable. As proof that the mountains were possessed by the devil, the learned physicist and mathematician Johann Jacob Scheuchzer in 1702 compiled an encyclopedic list of dragon sightings in the Alps. (Mons Pilatus was said to harbor a particularly hideous monster, with a head "that terminated in the serrated jaw of a serpent...
...said he was God's son. C.S. Lewis was blunt in dismissing efforts at compromise. "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd either be a lunatic . or else he'd be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse...