Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Deep down, we would like every writer to be either a natural reaconteur or a mystic. Partly, this is because the role goes with the job, as the priest's garb goes with his--we want assurance that the author is inspired. Partly, it is because personality is something we can grasp and bring down to earth: if we can possess the personality, perhaps we can possess the inspiration. The poet-priest is sacred; no one (now) would dare be hostile to Borges...
Backward Film. Vonnegut's view of man is not new. Indeed he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck. Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: "Whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping." Then he added: "We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus...
Positive: Intense, emotional, staminal, shrewd Negative: Sarcastic, vindictive Career: Investigator, doctor, mystic...
Berosus would have understood perfectly what Sheila was up to. Indeed, Sheila's astrological calculations would be one of the few things he would find familiar in the modern world after 50 centuries. It is one of the stranger facts about the contemporary U.S. that Babylon's mystic conceptions of the universe are being taken up seriously and semiseriously by the most scientifically sophisticated generation of young adults in history. Even the more bc.cult arts of palmistry, numerology, fortunetelling and witchcraft?traditionally the twilight zone of the undereducated and overanxious?are catching on with youngsters. Bookshops that cater...
...last third of the book, Lasing describes the experiences which trans-familiar to the religious mystic and to some psychotics. They are associated with the source of life, eternity, death-in-life, timelessness, knowledge of the void, and the divine founts of religion and ecstasy...