Word: mindlessness
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Already Odysseus has begun to question, to doubt. To his surprise, he begins to find newborn sympathies with slaves and common folk. The old Greek gods have become objects of scorn, and what started as a mindless search for adventure has now become a journey of selfdiscovery. In Egypt he and his pals thieve and loot, fight against the depraved rulers and finally lead a ragged army to the headwaters of the Nile. There Odysseus builds a Utopian city-state in which marriage is outlawed, children are held in common, and the old and weak are left...
...peered up at a towering Briton and jovially remarked: "It's not that you are so tall. It is just that we, at the moment, are too short." That Mao has started China growing again is a fact of incalculable importance. If human beings can be reduced to mindless production-line cogs, Red China may one day achieve the stature for which its rulers yearn. But, so far. the crucial elements of Chinese Communist power are still supplied by Russia. It was not Chinese strength but the fear of Russian involvement that ultimately led the U.S. to deny itself...
...business, not man's. The book's best tale is the title story about Gimpel. who has seven names in all: 'Imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool. The last name stuck." Gimpel the Fool is the butt of all cruel, mindless jokesters. He will believe anything: that the dead have arisen, that the Czar is visiting Frampol, even that his wife is faithful. In the first place, he believes because, after all, anything is possible. In the second place, he believes because if he does not, everyone shouts at him, his termagant wife loudest...
François Mauriac, France's most famed living Catholic novelist, can say more in 150 pages than can most writers in twice that number. Mauriac seems to hold that the sins of a Robert Lagave are venial because he is the sort of mindless pagan who could scarcely recognize God if he met Him in a blaze of light on the road to Damascus. The real sinners are those who know God but love only themselves or their illusions. The killing of Robert Lagave brings with it a moment of shocked awareness that soon fades: Paula weeps...
Tomtomfoolery. From Horatio Alger, Satirist West moved on to Hollywood, where he had worked as a script writer. Apart from the usual film-colony grotesques, The Day of the Locust parades witless cowboys, actors, emotional cripples, dwarfs and a memorably mindless, chrome-pated sexpot. It ends in madness and violence, like the others-a mob at a Hollywood premiere tramples an artist, who is carried offstage screaming...