Word: devil
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...differences in their personalities showed up in the different games they played. Connors was a brassy player, a big hitter who missed a lot. He played a wild game, laying it all on the line on every shot, high on a devil's dare. Down 6-5 and receiving in the third set he would hit out and go for winners. And on match point he'd rush the net on a straight line and curve short to crosscourt an underspin backhand off his toes. He spiced up his play with plenty of theatrics on the side--yelling, swearing, screaming...
...gods to record for posterity the sad details of Jason's split from Medeia. While this anonymous poet is only a neutral observer, he tries desperately to alter the course of events by reconciling the couple. Only Medeia can see him, and she thinks he's a devil. Gardner's helpless narrator is the hilarious antithesis to the traditional omniscient, omnipotent story-teller. At one point he is actually transformed into flesh and almost killed in a Corinthian slave uprising. While this clown stumbles about Corinth like Jimmy Olson, cub reporter for the Daily Planet, Superman Gardner delves into more...
That powerful "nothingness," says Updike, is named the devil-and the devil pervades man's experience. "These grand ghosts did not arise from a vacuum; they grow (and if pruned back will sprout again) from the deep exigencies and paradoxes of the human condition. We know that we will live, and know that we will die. We love the creation that upholds us and sense that it is good; yet pain and plague and destruction are everywhere...
Good fortune is no escape, Updike warns. "Indeed, the more fortunate our condition, the stronger the lure of negation, of perversity, of refusal . . . Thus the devil thrives in proportion, is always ready to enrich the rich man with ruin, the wise man with folly, the beautiful woman with degradation, the kind, average man with debauches of savagery. The world always topples...
What does all this suggest to Updike? "I would timidly, as a feeble believer and worse scholar, open the question of the devil as a metaphysical possibility, if not necessity...