Word: tormented
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...circumstances in his first two novels, The Lost Country and Lilith. Just because the Pritchards are so ordinary, the corruption wrought by self-knowledge in A Sea Change is more ironic and profound. In an attempt to provoke a return to the freshness of their early love, the Pritchards torment each other in various subtle as well as insidious ways-until nothing is left of their marriage...
...were viewing the crucifixion and being crucified at the same time. The incantatory rendering of dialogue sometimes resembles the Mass. The sounds that the cast utters are as arresting as if they were the cries of the damned in hell. On the rack of torment, Cieslak's body shudders convulsively from head to toe, and few athletes could begin to match the physical suppleness of a cast that seems as fit for dance as drama. At times, the company freezes in still lifes of agony. One is constantly aware of Cieslak's psychic pain, a pain beyond tears...
...Luxembourg that Rodin invited him to work in his studio. Brancusi refused. "Nothing grows well in the shadow of a big tree," he said, and spent the next two years working in virtual isolation. His last work in a traditional mode is the tender portrait head, Torment. Then, in 1907, he made the great break with the past that determined the whole future course of his career...
Your very soul was revealed to me a stretch of wild and secret country, with eerie chasms and abysses neighbored by sunlit, smiling meadows, haunts of idyllic repose...I saw good and evil wrestling with each other. I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony; I divined a personality, a drama, and "truthfulness," the most uncompromising truthfulness...
These offenses are political in their origin and active thrust. They share in the special fury of political passion, which is, as Pasternak described it, like the fury and torment of adolescent love: "It tears one to shreds, and nothing save harm seems to come of it. At the same time one can not get free of it. And all who enter as people into history will always pass through...