Word: koestler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Poet Stephen Spender, Horizon never reached more than 10,000 subscribers, though it was probably the best of the little magazines. Lately circulation and advertising had been slipping and costs rising. More important, the galaxy of literary lights who had once brightened its pages-T. S. Eliot, Arthur Koestler, Evelyn Waugh-have not shown there in the last year...
Professors from three fields will discuss Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" at the Graduate Forum at 8 p.m. tonight in Emerson...
Saith the Preacher. What is to be done about this? Man, says Koestler, must make a tremendous effort to put his two vital impulses together in such a way that they will restore him to balance. He must be self-assertive, i.e., he must give full rein to his "exploratory" nature, and by thinking for himself, break through the "horny crust" of habit and convention. If he performs this self-assertion courageously, he will escape from the vanities of the "Trivial Plane" into the self-transcending verities and "cosmic perspective" of the "Tragic Plane." On the other hand, nothing...
...bulk of the book is devoted to the twin impulses: self-assertion and self-transcendence. Koestler believes that the western world owes its troubles to the "hypertrophy of the self-asserting drives with a corresponding decline of the self-transcending impulses." There were times, he holds, when man was more capable of being both self-assertive and self-transcending (in the Greek and Renaissance civilizations) and by being a bit of both he managed to be a more balanced, stable creature. But he is sure that today man is either overactive or over-passive-or a dissatisfied neurotic who plunges...
...plea for moral courage, Insight and Outlook might have made a simple and admirable essay by a man who has shown plenty of courage in his day. What the reader will find irritating and incomprehensible is that Author Koestler has let his self-assertive impulse so surround his simple theme with scientific stage props and mechanistic explanations that his 1% of inspiration demands 99% of his readers' perspiration...