"Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy"
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De Vries needles the soothing myth that baring your sins fixes anything. He grants confession a narrow virtue, then yanks it away with that exquisitely petty comparison: a tweed coat "good for dandruff". Tweed doesn't cure the scalp; it just hides the flakes. Confession, in this framing, is wardrobe therapy for moral discomfort: it makes you feel presentable, not transformed.
The joke lands because it treats spiritual crisis like a grooming problem, dragging the lofty language of "the soul" down to the itchy, everyday body. That demotion is the point. De Vries is skeptical of any ritual that converts messy interior change into a neat external performance. Confessing can function like social hygiene: you preempt judgment by judging yourself first, you narrate your failure in a way that sounds responsible, you trade the hard labor of repair for the easier drama of disclosure.
The subtext is especially sharp in a mid-century American culture steeped in both religious moralism and a growing market for therapeutic self-revelation. Confession becomes a consumer product: relief on demand, absolution as a feeling. De Vries, a novelist with a comedian's ear, understands how institutions (church, psychoanalysis, even polite society) can reward candor as spectacle while leaving the underlying habit untouched.
"Palliative rather than a remedy" is clinical language, and it’s cutting: confession may numb the pain, but it can also prolong the disease by convincing you that relief is the same as healing.
The joke lands because it treats spiritual crisis like a grooming problem, dragging the lofty language of "the soul" down to the itchy, everyday body. That demotion is the point. De Vries is skeptical of any ritual that converts messy interior change into a neat external performance. Confessing can function like social hygiene: you preempt judgment by judging yourself first, you narrate your failure in a way that sounds responsible, you trade the hard labor of repair for the easier drama of disclosure.
The subtext is especially sharp in a mid-century American culture steeped in both religious moralism and a growing market for therapeutic self-revelation. Confession becomes a consumer product: relief on demand, absolution as a feeling. De Vries, a novelist with a comedian's ear, understands how institutions (church, psychoanalysis, even polite society) can reward candor as spectacle while leaving the underlying habit untouched.
"Palliative rather than a remedy" is clinical language, and it’s cutting: confession may numb the pain, but it can also prolong the disease by convincing you that relief is the same as healing.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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