Word: cravates
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...little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily on the steps. Nevertheless, Camus is an honest, deeply intelligent man of near genius, who has tried to restate basic Christian morality...
...disappearance of God from the calculations of the modern intellectual has put a rope of despair round his neck. And they may respect Camus' astonishingly simple faith that things will be more comfortable if it is agreed to call despair "lack of hope," and the rope a cravat...
...timid lover ("With a little more assurance or a little less love, I would perhaps have been sublime and would have had her"). The fluttering social butterfly ("I was brilliant ... I was wearing a waistcoat, silk breeches and black stockings, with a cinnamon-bronze coat, a very well arranged cravat, a superb frill . . . My whole soul appeared") was brought to earth by the lucid critic ("I realize that the works I've written stink...
...eccentric comes to stay in a small British town. He is one of the harmless kind who imagines he is Napoleon Bonaparte, carries a rabbit in his old-fashioned beaver, decks out in a Dickensian weskit and cravat, and parades the streets in perfect weather under an open umbrella, followed by mobs of delighted children. Everybody calls him Napoleon, and is happy to have him around for laughs. The beauty of it is that Napoleon, in a well-juggled ending, turns out to be not so mad after all-or is he really much, much madder...
When Silvio came back to Contrada in 1933, he was 40 years old, a man of substance, with a real pearl stickpin in his cravat. He built a luxurious villa outside the village, and proceeded to show his contempt for the Contradese in a perverse display of ostentation and charity. He refused to enter the village but gave generously to the local church, and twice each year he would drive his blooded Arab horse around the outskirts to the back door of a house in which some Contradese girl cried her heart out because her family lacked money...