Just finished reading Oscar Wilde's brilliant essay, The Decay of Lying. There are so many good passages, and while this is hardly the most profound, it was the funniest:
"The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any moral tale in the whole of literature."
Raposo, the exuberant and hilarious protagonist of Eca de Quiroz's brilliant novel The Relic, is in the tradition of Wilde when he announces the need for "the shameless heroism to lie."
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