Antirrhesis (an-tir-rhee’-sis): Rejecting reprehensively the opinion or authority of someone.
Me: “I gotta tell you, you’re off your nut.” I said “Eating a book will not make you smarter. It will make sick. This is the most asinine idea you ever came up with. Eating Plato’s Meno will not make you one bit wiser, even if you only eat a little bit— maybe a half-page per week. Read it, don’t eat it, for God’s sake!”
You: “Lookit asshole—you are the idiot here. Stop dictating my life’s course with your inflexible “down to earth” bullshit. You are, once again, rejecting something you could benefit from just because of your life in the Nerdy Sphere, where everything is careful-careful, tiptoeing around truth like it is a piece of dog crap on your carpet. Wake up num-nuts, smell the coffee and roses, and other things that are reminders of life’s joys. Instead, you’re going around like you’re sniffing wet dogs and cans of ‘4,000 Dead Fish Heads’ cat food.
I learned about book eating on the internet: ‘Swallow the Truth.’ There was a picture of the bearded Swami Litterati sitting in a red Cadillac convertible on a tropical beach. The website explained the benefits of ingesting books—how they would literally be digested by your body, and eventually your brain without having to put in the effort of reading. ‘Swallow the Truth’ has a cookbook for sale for $15.00. I purchased one. It shows how you can include book pages in a variety of dishes—making them really easy to swallow. My favorite is ‘Paperback Pizza.’
I have been eating Plato’s dialogues for the past year and I’m almost done. I’m still waiting for the ‘message’ to come through, but I have learned something very deep: Having faith in something that has no discernible affect on your life, is the faithfullest faith you could ever have, and if faith is all you need, nothing else matters—just faith with no return—with a foundation in futility. So, as I eat the dialogues to no effect, there is a lesson: futility is the pinnacle of human experience. Living life with no expectations of a return for your efforts will set you free. So, now I’m going to eat a page out of Plato’s Gorgias. I’ve moistened it and sprinkled it with powdered sugar to improve its taste. Here goes!”
Me: To impress me, he wadded up the page and stuffed it in his mouth and tried to swallow it whole without chewing. He started choking. I gave him the Heimlich Maneuver. I tugged and lifted and hugged and hugged. He was going limp and turning colors. I reached in his mouth to fish out the paper wad and he bit me. The ambulance arrived. The EMT guy had a thing like a drain snake with tweezers on the end. She shoved it down my friend’s throat, twisted it, and pulled out the paper wad. He took a big breath. My friend was going to live!
I went to see him at the hospital and he blamed me for what had happened. I told him to go fu*k himself and left, slowly wadding up a quarter-page of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I was sorely tempted to pop it into my mouth. But instead, I threw it on the floor and crushed it with my boot.
Definition courtesy of Silva Rhetoricae (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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