Word: sphinx
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Perhaps he follows the critic's beam hoping the critic will lend it to him after a while, hoping that if he reads "Paradise Lost" often enough, he will discover his own experience. The experiment is seldom tried, and I also suspect that the poem, like the sphinx, speaks only when he expects to hear a voice, and that following the critics will produce only the voice which he has been told he will hear. If he reads a book about which he has heard enough, he can only react in those particular terms. He may reject or accept...
...miscalculations began with Nasser. Indications are that Eden never expected and certainly never prepared his nation for all-out war with Egypt. Instead, Eden apparently believed that Nasser was a straw sphinx who would crumble at the first threat of military action against him. Eden may also have underestimated the depth and vigor of the U.S. response, and of the amount of moral indignation toward aggression still left in the world...
...immortal soul. Then came Sigmund Freud to champion a newer hypothesis: man. without a God. is largely governed by a strange, little-known power called the Unconscious. It was a startling, indeed a discomfiting theory (though it had been hinted at even before Oedipus confronted the Sphinx), for it asked man to alter his vision of himself and almost everything that he valued, from his religion to his mode of dress...
...Said of Oedipus by the chorus at the close of Oedipus Tyrannus. Finding his native Thebes terrorized by a Sphinx that slew all who could not answer her riddles, Oedipus answered her correctly, and the Sphinx destroyed herself. He then married Jocasta, by whom he had four children, not knowing she was his own mother, or that he had killed his own father. *The Greek god of love, better known these days as Cupid...
...needle the U.S. in their reports. They noted and disapproved a "greed for profit." ("A unique means of making a profit is shown by Jack Graham, who blew up his mother and a plane for the insurance.") They rapped U.S. TV for showing too many commercials ("Only a stone sphinx could stick to one of these performances to the very end"). But they gave readers of Pravda, Izvestia and other leading Soviet journals the friendliest, most appreciative view of the U.S. since the wartime alliance. Russians, long accustomed to trite fictions about hungry armies of U.S. unemployed, read such items...