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...Falstaff McClosky just didn't fit. All his friends knew he didn't fit and perhaps he had known it first of all. Here he was twenty years old, a Harvard junior, and completely left out. It was irony pure and simple. Everyone else seemed at least partially unfulfilled, partially frustrated, somewhat disturbed. But not Falstaff. His life was a model of emotional serenity. Indeed, it was often doubted that he possessed any emotions in the first place. He had failed completely to achieve frustration...

Author: By John B. Radner, | Title: Togetherness | 11/18/1958 | See Source »

Possibly he hadn't tried hard enough. The others entertained ambitions--intellectual ambitions, athletic ambitions, social and political ambitions--and those who entertain ambitions undershoot the mark a good sixty-two percent of the time. This is the real key to dejection, but a key Falstaff never held. He simply didn't desire. He didn't care to. He really didn't care...

Author: By John B. Radner, | Title: Togetherness | 11/18/1958 | See Source »

...fellows in the entry, his friends in Adams and Dunster, and even his friends in Eliot, were certain to drop in and ask him for a walk "just to cheer old Falstaff up." How little Falstaff needed this super-added cheer they could hardly imagine. On the contrary, they distrusted his seeming calm. They thought his satisfied air a cloak veiling deep festering pools of insidious despair. They feared a crack-up were his troubles perpetually suppressed. And possibly they perceived in his calm something more than merely "taking things in stride"--saw the serious threat he posed...

Author: By John B. Radner, | Title: Togetherness | 11/18/1958 | See Source »

Thus went the talk, the distilled ideas danced circles in the air, and there Falstaff stood, an outsider, one of the happy few. He just had to cultivate a frustration, if only a mild one; and this was no mean commission. Falstaff gathered his vague resolution and tried to desire...

Author: By John B. Radner, | Title: Togetherness | 11/18/1958 | See Source »

...anyone really tack telos onto a life already so self-containing, so much a closed system, as Falstaff's? And if so, how? Falstaff was stymied. He tried a game of solitaire, but it came out; worked a cross-word puzzle, but it was a snap; cheered one Saturday for a Harvard upset victory, but only the experts found frustration (Falstaff was gloriously intoxicated and had a wonderful time). And still his hope gushed, so he found no frustration even in his many failures to achieve illusive melancholy. It was really bad news...

Author: By John B. Radner, | Title: Togetherness | 11/18/1958 | See Source »

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