Word: cartesian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fountains, statues and aviaries suggest the Cartesian excesses of Versailles. Other English formal gardens such as those at Sissinghurst Castle, Blenheim Palace and Henry VIII's Hampton Court featured mazes, topiary animals, tiny canals and ornate fountains
...gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following...
...look." For expressionism was largely an ethical matter, a display of exemplary anguish. It was one of the last convulsions of northern romanticism; and like all romantic painting, it was essentially an art of subject matter. The expressionist attitude lay at the opposite pole of experience from the sensuous, Cartesian quality of French art. At the time Kirchner painted his self-portrait in conscript's uniform, France had also experienced-from the other side of the trenches-the horrors of total war. But nothing by a major French painter in those traumatic years resembled Kirchner's paroxysm...
...certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint-the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward-across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town of the Cartesian odalisque...
Seaver can be forgiven these slight excesses, however, since his purpose is to impart an enthusiasm of discovery like his own to the unfamiliar reader, not to confront him with the airy abstractions like "The Cartesian Centaur," "The Metaphysics of Choiceless Awareness," and of course, "Waiting for Beckett," so favored by critics. Seaver shunts critics aside: "The point to remember is that, with or without exegesis, Beckett is great fun." As usual, Beckett says it better: "If people have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin...