Word: cults
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...agree with all you say except that I think you're wrong about European attitudes. The cult of the young is inanely proliferate all over the Continent and Britain. There are TV programs in which the main idea is to focus the camera on young faces; people adore them just because they're so beautifully young...
...called Dorian Gray. It is true that Dorian Gray never grew old. His tragedy was that he never grew. Earthly immortality is a pathetic mirage. Time will not stop. In an attempt to stop it, one merely stunts one's self. The ultimate victims of the Youth Cult are the young, some of whom believe that turning 25 is the outer limit of human obsolescence. The Youth Cult misleads them into thinking that license is freedom, that untutored whims are tastes, and that ever-jittering motions are deeds. Since it is the specific problem and task of middle-agers...
...Shoe. The object of supreme adoration was the bound foot itself. It was caressed with an intensity and ingenuity that often make this volume read like a Chinese Kinsey report. The cult of the lotus inspired a corollary cult of the shoe. Many a young man slept with a slipper that belonged to his beloved-indeed, an elderly Chinese ambassador to Moscow made no secret of the fact that he carried a trunk of tiny shoes and, as Levy puts it, "privately amused himself with them...
...with Pentheus of Thebes looking something like a teenage Marshal Ky, and the god Dionysus a blond-haired cigarette-smoking James Dean. The first resemblance is most pointed; Babe interprets the autocratic, highly organized government of Thebes as a garrison--perhaps fascist--state, threatened by the earthly, irrational Dionysiac cult. The interpretation works in that Babe's production is exciting theatre, and in the end faithful to the original as well. Just the same there are points worth questioning...
Certainly Thebes is a violent, rational state; here the parallel with fascism seems valid. But where does such an interpretation leave Dionysus, whose orgiastic cult--according to Philip Vellacott, another translator of The Bacchac--offers "an escape from reason back to the simple joys of a mind and body surrendered to unity with Nature?" The Dionysiac escape is a far cry from democracy, one obvious alternative to fascism. Its closeness to nature and opposition to organized civilization are, in fact, as integral components of Nazism as the military order of Pentheus. The Dionysiac cult is the ancestor of the same...