“On Macbeth and his tendencies”,
In Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the titular character is a power-hungry wimp who only considers himself.
In Act Two, Scene 2, he enters Inverness, Duncan’s castle, at night with Lady Macbeth. She urges him to commit the murders, and wants the power, but cannot bring himself to. After murdering Duncan, he says to Lady Macbeth, “Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house. ‘Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore / Cawdor / Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more’” (II.2.54-57). This shows that he’s a wimp – completely scared of what will happen to him – while also power-hungry – because he still did it.
This actually isn’t really that far off from how I used to be. Maybe not power-hungry specifically, but I definitely used to be a wimp. When I was about 8 or so my mother took me to therapy. The therapist was a Jewish man; I forgot his name. I essentially told him that I was scared of the dark because I was worried that someone would break into “noise therapy”—basically he told my mother to put on rain sounds on her phone when we slept (we slept in the same bed at the time, because I was scared) and that that would help me fall asleep. We ended up doing that for about 2 more years until I started sleeping in my own bed. Yes, at 10 years old.
“Wimp” can also mean, in my opinion at least, someone who commits to something and then withdraws when he sees how significant the task is. I’ve done this a million times with books. I remember one time when I was 10 or 9 I went to the library and checked out a copy of War and Peace. This was at my old school, when Q was still there. His real name was Quentin Williams. He worked at our school for a while; I can’t remember what for. He was probably the single nicest adult I had ever known around that time. Eventually he left the school to join the state House of Representatives, and I left to come here, and he went to a ball the day after re-election, and he died in a wrong-way car crash, and I can’t remember who was going the wrong way, and I can’t be bothered to look it up now, because it might make me disappointed in Q, because I remember he had something in his system, and he is dead now. He will be dead forever. ♦