Topical Guide 377
Mark Dorset
Guilt: Feelings of
THE ESSENCE of the Piper failing was a tendency to let the heart rule the mind. We all suffer from this disease at some times, to some degree. It has consequences other than bad investments. It makes some of us write books and compose music and paint pictures. It makes some of us try to restore two-hundred-year old wooden houses or twenty-year-old British sports cars. It makes some of us fall in love. It makes some of us insist that, of all the people who have collaborated on an error, we are supremely blameworthy. That is how Herb felt. He couldn’t escape the feeling that all the blame for the losses the Spotters were going to suffer was his.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 17
Was it all my fault? It may have been. The effects of the things we do extend themselves, like a chain or a relay network, reaching farther than we suppose, so all our acts have unforeseen consequences, and I suspect that someone, somewhere, suffers for every mistake I make.
Peter Leroy in Leaving Small’s Hotel
Naïveté; Folly
He could think of only one way out, one way to make things right and relieve his conscience, and the key to the door that led to that way out was coarse-goods work. Herb hoped that he could earn enough money to buy the Spotters’ stock for what they had originally paid for it. (He expected, by the way, that they would refuse to sell. He thought they wouldn’t want to let him increase his suffering to relieve theirs. He expected that he would have to persuade them that he was buying the stock because he still believed that he would make a profit on it. He was wrong. These feelings were merely further symptoms of the essential Piper failing.)
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 17
See also: Folly TG 28
George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96
He depicted a quirky cast of people and pets — notably his mad-as-a-hatter bull terrier, which became a reader favorite and the magazine’s unofficial mascot.
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