Limb-Loping and Reality Checks

A wise professor made an interesting analogy today - one that struck a chord with me, as I've been mulling over similar thoughts lately. Here I will paraphrase to the best of my memory: We have to lop off pieces of ourselves that don't fit society, so we constantly live in a state of secret melancholy. Within the boundaries of society, we do not know ourselves. To have self-knowledge would be profoundly shattering.
Of course, it was an English Literature class, and of course, we were talking about Shakespeare and his play The Merchant of Venice. The argument the professor was making was that the character Antonio was homosexual, and that in this Shakespearean comedy, his character provided a foil to the ultimate jubilant celebrations that befall the "good Christian" characters in the end. A foil?! Oh yes. I thought Antonio was one of the good Christians?! Oh no. While Antonio is not bad or sinful in the obvious way that Shylock the Jew is portrayed, his covert homosexual nature (as the professor argues) leaves him in his own lonely orbit, a world apart from the happy lovers that decorate the end of the play. In his Venetian society, he cannot (and really, he should not) admit to his homosexual love for Bassanio. Now, is Antonio really that different from Shylock? Both cannot be his true nature: one is a supposed homosexual and the other is a Jew. Both are effectively barricaded from society because they are fundamentally deviants of the social norm. There's a good Shakespearean comedy for you: you can get the happy ending if you're "normal". Oh, and the Christians get to define normality. Yay!
So, fair readers, what's in a happy ending, a triumph? Who fits and who doesn't fit? If you're too short we will stretch you out on the rack; if you're too tall we will just lop off the parts that don't fit. That's all.

Because somehow in my head this makes perfect sense to add on at the end of a limb-lopment: I will admit that I sometimes get in over my head and go to extremes. Or in other words, I forget to lop off my daily ration of fingers and toes and whatnot. My secret self that must hide in melancholy from all the world sometimes gets too much nourishment (now is it too much university education? too much time for frivolous thinking? the internet and the horrible things that I can get my hands on?) and thus grows too large and fast. Thank God I have my sister, the pharmaceutical student, to remind me of my manners.