Word: falstaff
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...