Word: castaneda
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...account, Castaneda was not his original name. He was born, he said, to a "well-known" but anonymous family in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Christmas...
...Castaneda's presentation of himself as Mr. Straight, it should be noted, could not be better designed to foil those who seek to know his own personal history. What, in fact, is his background? The "historical" Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist and apprentice shaman, begins when he met Don Juan in 1960; the books and his well-documented career at U.C.L.A. account for his life since. Before that...
...spending many hours with Castaneda over a matter of weeks, TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton found him attractive, helpful and convincing ?up to a point?but very firm about warning that in talking about his pre-Don Juan life he would change names and places and dates without, however, altering the emotional truth of his life. "I have not lied or contrived," he told her. "To contrive would be to pull back and not say anything or give the assurances that everybody seeks." As the talks continued, Castaneda offered several versions of his life, which kept changing as Burton presented...
When Carlos was six, his story runs, his parents took their only child back and lavished guilty affection on him. "It was a hellish year," he says flatly, "because I was living with two children." But a year later his mother died. The doctors' diagnosis was pneumonia, but Castaneda's is accidie, a condition of numbed inertia, which he believes is the cultural disease of the West. He offered a touching memory: "She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied; an ornament. My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she listen...
...Carlos was left with his father, a shadowy figure whom he mentions in the books with a mixture of fondness and pity shaded with contempt. His father's weakness of will is the obverse to the "impeccability" of his adopted father, Don Juan. Castaneda describes his father's efforts to become a writer as a farce of indecision. But, he adds, "I am my father. Before I met Don Juan I would spend years sharpening my pen cils, and then getting a headache every time I sat down to write. Don Juan taught me that's stupid. If you want...