Topical Guide 768
Mark Dorset
Personages, Fictional: Ralph and Alice Kramden
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 57:
“The show that I always think of as the Ralph Kramden show was on, and […] I could tell right away, the moment Ralph came through the apartment door with a cagey smile on his face, that this was going to be one of those episodes in which his ego, his conviction that he could be someone more than he was capable of being, would get him into horrible trouble and make life a little bleaker for him and the unbelievably forgiving Alice, but that Alice would forgive him, again, unbelievably, unforgivably, and that at the end of it all, after that poor woman had forgiven him, he would say, in a voice breaking with contrition and humility, a voice that I never believed, not for a minute, “Alice, you’re the greatest,” […]
Allusion, Quotation
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 57:
“I made you uncomfortable. I made you squirm. Well, ‘don’t be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous.’ I’ll be amusing again in a while.”
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)
Monsieur G. [Constantin Guys] has a horror of blasé people. He is a master of that only too difficult art—sensitive spirits will understand me—of being sincere without being absurd. . . .
Let not the reader be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous; let him rather recall that there is a grandeur in all follies, an energy in all excess. . . .
See also:
Personages, Fictional: Kap’n Klam TG 589; Gregory Tschudin TG 705, TG 736
Allusion; Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583, TG 592, TG 626, TG 654, TG 657, TG 714, TG 735, TG 736, TG 738
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