Word: tree
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SYCAMORE TREE: THE GOOD TIMES AND HARD LIFE OF THOMAS MERTON by Edward Rice. 144 pages. Doubleday...
...revolt; his final turning toward Buddhism as a "way" that could complement Christianity; his incongruous moments, as when he took the time to see What's New, Pussycat? and thought it very funny. Because Merton was a man of such fevers and contradictions, The Man in the Sycamore Tree cannot be so much an explanation of Merton as a hint of an explanation-but that is achievement enough...
...such determined scramblings down the tree of life, E.M. Cioran, 59, has made himself into a kind of one-man cult of the culdesac: the king of the pessimists in a bumper year for pessimists. Cioran's recent book of essays-"fragments" he likes to call them-threatens with success a man whose first principle is to hold success in contempt. See the chapter on "Fame: Hopes and Horrors...
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...
...Cioran argues in the chapter on "The Tree of Life," really chose the wrong tree in preferring knowledge to life. "Once we know," he writes, "we are at odds with everything." For instead of serving man, reason "affords him arguments against himself." History Cioran reads as the disaster of man evolving "toward a complexity which is ruining him." "Progress," says Cioran, "is the modern equivalent of the Fall...