Word: abyss
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...life had taken and of the connection between writing and drinking. "If you are an artist," he says, "self-destruction is quite expected of you. Orphic myths popped up early, showing singers being torn apart by Harpies to the infinite satisfaction of society. The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes, as it did in my case, contemptible...
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil...
Therefore if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting...
...clearly pointed out the abyss to which worship of revolution leads. Nonetheless, many Western European intellectuals are still reluctant to face the issue squarely. If the word "pure," when used by adherents of revolution, in effect means "barbarous," perhaps the best the world can hope for in its future political upheavals is a revolution that is as "corrupt" as possible. Such skewed values are, indeed, already rife in some quarters. During the 1960s, Mao's Cultural Revolution in China was admired by many leftist intellectuals in the West, because it was supposedly "pure"-particularly by contrast with the bureaucratic...
...commencement speaker stirred as much attention as has the exiled Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both speeches were delivered in Harvard Yard, something of a symbol of the Western spirit of inquiry and humanism. The two speeches were separated by 31 years-but also by an immeasurable philosophical abyss. Marshall in 1947 was calling on the U.S., the world's supreme democracy, to turn its resources and energies to the rescue of an exhausted, endangered continent. Solzhenitsyn in 1978 was scourging the U.S. for spearheading the decline of the West...