More than just a safety net in times of tragedy, hope is present every day in a modern knight’s positive outlook and cheerful demeanor — the shining armor that shields him or her, and inspires people all around.
ellauri163.html on line 864: A precocious student, Durkheim entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1879, at his third attempt. The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century, as many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, went on to become major figures in France's intellectual history as well. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social-scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. At the same time, he read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, whereby Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. The writer of this exposition likes the word whereby.
ellauri185.html on line 830: The general negative outlook and eschewal of inbreeding that is prevalent in the Western world today has roots from over 2000 years ago. Specifically, written documents such as the Bible illustrate that there have been laws and social customs that have called for the abstention from inbreeding.
ellauri188.html on line 122: I have just returned from a seven months' trip to the Marquesas, and while the situation, due to the de- grading influences of so-called civilization by the whites, is serious enough from a humanitarian stand- point, I can hardly share, to its fullest extent, Mr. Wester's rather doleful outlook, either as regards the complete extinction of the true Marquesan or the ex tinetion of the breadfruit resulting from the disap pearance of the full-blooded native.
ellauri191.html on line 1332: "for his distinctive poetry, which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions"
ellauri191.html on line 1434: | "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power"
ellauri222.html on line 709: His literary tastes are also very interesting. Lord Pococurante is quite able to criticize Homer, Horace, and Cicero; there is nothing, which may seem flawless. His ability to find defects in everything prevents him from taking pleasure in literature, philosophy, and painting. It is obvious that the author is ironic about him, it can be deduced from Candides remark “But is there not a pleasure in criticizing everything, in pointing out faults where others see nothing but beauties’ (Voltaire, 73). The main problem is that such a world outlook is a personal tragedy, and such an attitude may eventually result in suicide.
ellauri236.html on line 198: There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less the same stamp as No Orchids. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of ‘pulp magazines’, graded so as to cater for different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same mental atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists. Sold at threepence a copy under the title of Yank Mags(4), these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in England, but when the supply dried up owing to the war, no satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English imitations of the ‘pulp magazine’ do now exist, but they are poor things compared with the original. English crook films, again, never approach the American crook film in brutality. And yet the career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the American influence has already gone. Not only is he himself living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of readers who know what is meant by a ‘clipshop’ or the ‘hotsquat’, do not have to do mental arithmetic when confronted by ‘fifty grand’, and understand at sight a sentence like ‘Johnny was a rummy and only two jumps ahead of the nut-factory’. Evidently there are great numbers of English people who are partly americanized in language and, one ought to add, in moral outlook. For there was no popular protest against No Orchids. In the end it was withdrawn, but only retrospectively, when a later work, Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief, brought Mr. Chase's books to the attention of the authorities. Judging by casual conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a mild thrill out of the obscenities of No Orchids, but saw nothing undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people, incidentally, were under the impression that it was an American book reissued in England.
ellauri236.html on line 204: In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
ellauri236.html on line 208: Several people, after reading No Orchids, have remarked to me, ‘It's pure Fascism’. This is a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connexion with politics and very little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 122: Today, Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world. This is partly because his works have not been readily available. Partly the specific themes he discusses are unfashionable and "foreign". A sombre and yet ecstatic atmosphere permeates his writings. And his quasi-nihilistic position and religious outlook are an unsettling and incongruous combination, at first sight.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 157: In the interwar years, Shestov continued to develop into a thinker of great prominence. During this time he had become totally immersed in the study of such "great theologians" as Blaise Pascal and Plotinus, whilst at the same time lecturing at the Sorbonne in 1925. In 1926 he was introduced to Edmund Husserl, with whom he maintained a cordial relationship despite radical differences in their philosophical outlook. In 1929, during a return to Freiburg he met with Nazi Heidegger, and was urged to study Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 182: Today, Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world. This is partly because his works have not been available in English. Partly the specific themes he discusses are unfashionable and "foreign". A sombre and yet ecstatic atmosphere permeates his writings. And his quasi-nihilistic position and religious outlook are an unsettling and incongruous combination, at first sight.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 248: Behold, the reviewer in the Washington Post, who groundlessly accused this book of being “racist” because it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line in its political outlook, described the scene thus: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.” Your author, by implication, yearns to bring back slavery. Failing that, she does the best to poke fictive fun at a fictive member of the underprivileged race. Nobody laugh?
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 95: He also wrote articles on encounters with angels in the parapsychological Tomorrow magazine of medium Eileen J. Garrett and a juvenile book The Guides Make Good in 1925. As the titles of some of his works indicate, much of Davidson´s verse is religious and spiritual in outlook and subject matter. He was also active as a translator and a book designer.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 814: Mencken was a controversial, and humorous journalist, who greatly affected American fiction in the 1920s. He ridiculed the US’s organized religion, business and middle class. He was a very critical man, who supported Germany during the war and had a very Marxist outlook on life. Bill refers to him, saying that he mocks God. Also this shows Bill’s character, that he is someone is very cynical and critical about life.
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