Marathe & Steeply on the temple: 'Make amusement all you wish'
‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. […]’
Context
Against Steeply's whole apparatus stands Marathe's register: earnest, accented, unembarrassed, and fully aware that to American ears it sounds either funny or naïve. "Make amusement all you wish" is the concession an ironic culture forces on a sincere speaker — he knows his conviction reads to Steeply as an occasion for mockery — and he simply proceeds anyway, appending his plain "No?" to solicit an assent the flippant will never give. That is the foreign physics of single-entendre speech: statements meant all the way down, offered without the quotation marks Americans reflexively reach for, unprotected by irony and therefore, to the disease, ridiculous. (The substance of what one chooses to die for is the choosing-your-master material of entertainment-self, BUILT; the landed insight here is Marathe's manner, not his doctrine.)