Word: bestial
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...grew older, as dizziness, deafness and amnesia successively set in, Swift lapsed into "incessant strains of obscenity and swearing." A statute of lunacy was taken out against him, and he spent the last three years of his life sunk in bestial stupor. "I am what I am," he muttered not long before his death. "I am what I am." He was a Yahoo. Yet he was Lucifer too: the great sinner was also a bringer of light...
...young man doesn't have to look far. The morning after his first night with the widow, she is grotesquely murdered by the vengeful villagers. Some clays later, as Zorba's silly old slut lies dying, bestial peasants burst into her house and strip it while she lies weakly watching, strip it to the walls and leave her there alone with nothing but a bed to die on. And at the climax of the film the mine and all the money the young man has sunk in it go smash in one catastrophic afternoon...
...That bestial scar on the angelic face...
...audience, reached too far down and has to be slapped back up again. Fanny Hill's malefaction is both to broaden and to elevate. The book succeeds in showing that sex need be neither an indecorous procreative necessity, as the better people ought to believe, nor a merely bestial gratification or exploitation, as the others are supposed to believe and prefer. It reaches too far in every direction and, therefore, has to be quashed...
Besides its philosophical protagonist, the work draws on a Goethean, even Shakespearean gamut of characters--from a university professor to the almost bestial beings that infest Central Park. And Miller's language rises at times to impressive prose poetry: "The wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears and with a stroke of love--as to an idiot in the house--forgive...