Word: skeptics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...retraining begins with a battery of psychological and educational tests, proceeds to freewheeling group-therapy sessions that discuss alcoholism, drugs and racism, then moves into academic or vocational programs. Lowry's atmosphere is so free that tales of prisoners' disbelief abound: to test the system, one skeptic walked off the base and waited for the MPs to converge. When none came, he meekly returned to his quarters, convinced of official good intentions...
...thinks communes should be experimented with, because "we've gone too far in the other direction-isolating the mother and child from other women and children." Although he approves of community day care for older children, he said of child care in the USSR and Israel, "To me, a skeptic, they haven't proved they can produce superior children. They've proved you can bring up average children that way, but I'm an elitist when it comes to raising children...
First published in France in 1964, the "fragments" of The Fall into Time are described by their author as "rather like sermons." The chapter headings are suggestive: "The Tree of Life," "Is the Devil a Skeptic?" "On Sickness," "The Dangers of Wisdom." If Cioran, against his will, can be taken as a spokesman for our times, it is because he so excruciatingly expresses the dilemma of the man born too late to be a Christian and too early to be anything else...
Obviously there is a Nietzschean streak in Cioran. A chapter called "Skeptic & Barbarian" dubs the skeptic -himself, of course-"that living dead man." With bitter sentimentality he half praises the barbarian, the man in touch with his instincts and out of touch with cursed self-awareness. "He who has never envied the vegetable," he writes, "has missed the human drama...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...