Word: cyrus
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...depth about those services. In his entry for May 19, Cohen describes a typical trip back home, two speeeches, lunch with one group, dinner with another, and visits with relatives and supporters--neither exciting nor enlightening. In an attempt to avoid angering anyone, his descriptions are all painfully complimentary. Cyrus Vance is a man of great "sincerity;" Ronald Reagan has "personal charm;" and former Senator John Culver is knowledgeable and articulate. Everyone in government seems a saint caught in a crazy system...
...several other missions on his mind. He wants to tell the story of his long life and his decades of service to the Persian Kings Darius the Great and Xerxes. Even more urgently, as a grandson and the last descendant in the male line of the prophet Zoroaster, Cyrus feels obliged to argue theology, to devise an acceptable theory for the creation of the universe and to account for the existence of evil within...
Pursuing these different ends, Cyrus produces a vast narrative, a virtual travelogue of the 5th century B.C. His services to the Persian Empire involve extensive travels throughout the known world. He goes to India to secure new sup plies of iron for Darius and then to far-off Cathay (China), where he is usually treated as a slave instead of an ambassador. His peripatetic existence throws him constantly into the presence of the powerful and influential. He meets, among others, Buddha, Confucius, an ar ray of Indian mystics and holy men, Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles. He knows people who knew Pythagoras...
This parade of celebrities is undeniably diverting, but Cyrus is often content to characterize the notables he meets by their names alone. Their singularity rests in who they were, not in how they are described in this narrative. Similarly, Cyrus' spiritual quest for the meaning of life is rendered as a series of set-piece seminars: one sage gives his philosophy, and then Cyrus goes off to seek another, who does the same. For long stretches, the narrator seems to be conducting a survey of ancient thought a la Will Durant: "As I understand Pythagoras-and who does...
Such passages are rarely dull, but they do produce a peculiar lifelessness in the novel as a whole. There is little to propel the reader forward except the expectation of more information. Vidal provides a multitude of incidents but no strong plot to bind them together. Cyrus abjures suspense; he has the habit of introducing characters by telling what finally happens to them first. Aside from the old man's large memory, Creation is unified by a single irony: Cyrus tells of his search for religious certainty to the person who will one day become an eminent philosopher...