Word: babel
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...lost that common spiritual measure which conferred upon the medieval and classical civilizations their grandeur and their sense of unity. . . . The words liberty, authority, spirit, justice, democracy, truth take on as many different meanings (and often incompatible ones) as there are standards of evaluation in our heads. ... At Babel, men divided because they began to speak different languages. Our situation is worse: we all pronounce the same words but at the same time give them different meanings...
...TOWER OF BABEL (427 pp.)-Ellas Conetti, translated by C. V. Wedgwood-Alfred Knopf...
Most American readers may well dare to deny The Tower of Babel's genius; few will deny its supreme madness or be deaf to its screams and bellows. Its principal character, Dr. Peter Kien, is the world's prime authority on Chinese, Japanese and Indian manuscripts. As a schoolboy prodigy, "in one minute Kien had memorized ∏ to 65 decimal places." As a grown-up scholar, he lives in solitude, utterly shut off from the world by the tomes of his magnificent library, wholly dedicated to pedantry. One sad day, this sexless, infantile genius decides to marry...
From this point on, The Tower of Babel becomes a ghastly sequence of horrors- or, as some may see it, a small-scale presentation of the fate of pure intellect in the clutches of today's harsh world. Slowly, inexorably, the new Mrs. Kien invades her hapless husband's ivory tower, teams up with the brutal janitor of the building to throw Kien out and sell his priceless library. Half-crazy, half-beaten to a pulp by his elephantine wife, Kien runs out into the streets-of which he is as ignorant as a babe-and takes shelter...
...over wide areas a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, careworn and bewildered human beings gaze on the ruins of their cities and scan the dark horizon for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror. Among the victors there is a babel of voices, among the vanquished a sullen silence of despair...