Word: belief
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sold him to movies, radio and TV. A mystery himself, Rohmer avoided people, tinkered with spiritualism, in later years wearied of Fu. His last book on Fu (Emperor Fu Manchu) will appear posthumously, fulfilling a prophecy that Fu once whispered to Rohmer's inflamed imagination: "It is your belief that you have made me; it is mine that I shall live when you are smoke...
...people never discover who is deviling them. The dreamers among them lean to the belief that it is Death himself. Death, for the author, is a grinning morality-play specter with his arm familiarly draped around Everyman, and this theory is the most tenable one that she leaves. Some readers may object that such mysticism is too woolly, but few of them will complain that Author Spark's funerary satire lacks bite. Any reader over 25-the age at which, as Scott Fitzgerald might have said, a man realizes that he must die-will have an uneasy time forgetting...
...otherwise inevitable world war with the Soviet Union was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three-to-one 2.) the group of 215 who chose war include over fourfifths of those who were also willing to affirm a belief in the immortality of the soul (all but fourteen persons), while 35 per cent of the non-believers took the opposite stand in favor of surrender...
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes the fate of this world immensely the more serious; it could be a spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate here: "a higher history than all history hitherto." Yet the orthodox often talk as though the death of the soul would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. Quite to the contrary, must be the nonbeliever's reply: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul...
...have surrendered the belief in heaven and in the resurrection of the dead--but nevertheless, no concern is to the non-believer more vital, urgent, and intimate than that with vitam venturi saeculi--the life of the world to come