"The soul is what I will contest"

Wherein rereading Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka because well ONE it's an entertaining book and easily read without being fluff and TWO to remind myself that he doesn't always and maybe rarely writes stupid crap


Lord Psnake is speaking to Lord Didgeridoo:

These are modern times. One murders differently. I will murder them with headlines, and my dagger will be speech. My poison will be the half-hidden mockery in a sentence read by millions, forgotten, and then recalled unknowingly by the reading of a sentence laden with half-hidden contempt. Their bodies shall be untouched. I will assassinate only the public persona, which, though it cannot be touched and has no weight, which though it merely floats through the imagination and has only the ethereal blood of words, exists nonetheless. When we kill the public persona of a man, his physical body, though it may not die, reels and retreats. He goes to ground as if wounded. He breathes hard. He thinks only of rest. He surrenders and is grateful to live out his days in obscurity.