Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...accomplishment. If the directions sometimes seem absurdly long, it is because the authors are bent on enabling a twelve-year-old to turn out a fine puff paste on first try. Still, Julia observes, "you must be interested in good food and good meals and you must have some devil-may-care spirit-je m'en foutisme. There is too much fear of failure in this culture...
First published in France in 1964, the "fragments" of The Fall into Time are described by their author as "rather like sermons." The chapter headings are suggestive: "The Tree of Life," "Is the Devil a Skeptic?" "On Sickness," "The Dangers of Wisdom." If Cioran, against his will, can be taken as a spokesman for our times, it is because he so excruciatingly expresses the dilemma of the man born too late to be a Christian and too early to be anything else...
Dispossessed of Christian hopes but disqualified by his Christian upbringing to hope in anything else, Cioran retains all the guilt a post-Christian could possibly manage. His God may have died; his devil is alive and well...
...which the police found in last week's raids, prompted by tips from police informers. Said one sympathetic Marseille cab driver, who earned less than $5 for eleven hours of work the previous day: "When it's so hard to earn a living, you sometimes tempt the devil." For tempting the devil, the Marseille boys face possible prison sentences of 15 to 20 years...
Kingman Brewster, in the standard interpretation of Mayday at Yale, emerges as a sort of Faust figure, a corrupt, conniving academic who sold his soul to the devil for an easy out. Very few people have compared him to Marguerite, the naive, innocent young girl whom Mephistopheles lures into damnation. The Faust interpretation, after all, has one important flaw; it presumes that the Yale administration is made up of Faustian academics overflowing with guile and cunning, who completely controlled the events of last spring. In fact, the reverse was true...