Word: promethean
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Alas, the Promethean gift has come to appear cruelly ironic, if not demonic, to a post-technology age that possesses-or is possessed by-the ultimate fire: nuclear power. Today, weary hindsight makes "progress" seem a mocking, self-defeating process by which men promise to improve themselves and their planet right out of existence...
...creative writer must now be to force his audience "to recognize and accept imaginatively . . . not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified." This mission may be regarded as carrying coals to Newcastle. Alvarez, however, clearly feels quietly (and personally) Promethean about...
There is little doubt about the direction of the swing today. Forty years ago, Picasso was a presence that every living artist had to cope with. His Promethean spirit was written into the idea of modernism itself. Not now. The only men of Picasso's generation whose work still exerts pressure on modern painting are Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). To artists nurtured on Duchampian irony, the very idea of the culture-hero, which Picasso embodies, is suspect. The last 15 years have seen a reaction against the cult of expressive personality...
...enduring revulsion against Chambers all but buried it critically. Now, nine years after his death, readers have a new occasion to study the lineaments of Whittaker Chambers' character and thought. He emerges as a man with an apocalyptic turn of mind and a weakness for describing himself in Promethean terms (I wanted to "give the children of men a slightly better chance to fight a battle already largely foredoomed"). He is a man who can speak of Communists as cobras and Socialists as pit-vipers. Yet his tragic concerns thrust far beyond such passion-and beyond simple-minded notions...
...sapphire, it seems entirely possible that so beautiful a machine might reach the moon. But with sunrise and the reappearance of the normal landscape, doubt intrudes; eventually, at a distance of three miles, the rocket seems to shrink in size and magic until it becomes an act of almost Promethean gall to aim it at the heavens...