Word: dilemma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tending Towards God. Author Camus is a fascinating case study of a modern thinker caught in a dilemma that is not confined to France or to French intellectuals. He stubbornly clings to the conviction that man is the measure of all things-the sentimental tradition of the Enlightenment. But he is far too intelligent and sensitive to accept the Enlightenment's shallow optimism and Utopian illusions about the human condition. On the other hand, he cannot move in the opposite direction towards religion. He is frozen midway. He accepts the Christian insight into the nature of evil, but rejects...
That is the harrowing dilemma that Camus sketched in essay form in The Myth of Sisyphus (TIME, Oct. 3, 1955) -the vision of a man in despair who can believe in damnation but not salvation. Yet in this novel there are clues of something else to come. The hero's name, Jean-Baptiste, is intriguing as a wordplay on John the Baptist, the herald of Christ's coming. The Fall is too obviously the novel of a man in mid-quest to be Camus' last word. Perhaps both book and author are best described by the late...
...critics discussed across the way pose a literary dilemma. They exemplify reading as it should be, and yet their influence is, on the whole, destructive. The very fact that they find reading immensely important, and do it with unusual acuteness, has tempted us to rely on them to do our reading for us. We seem to believe that if we read Dickens, and Trilling on Dickens, we are just as well off as Trilling. And how much easier it was to get there...
...despite our pain and distaste. The incapacity to read is, of course, only one symptom of the general addition to the self, a single phase of the incapacity to listen either to lecturers or poets, or friends, or lovers. And so he finally writes lyrical ballads to the existential dilemma, or becomes schizophrenic...
...Committee approved the Eisenhower resolution virtually intact by a 24-to-2 vote, moved it toward the House floor, where overwhelming approval is expected. But the committee report also noted that the resolution failed to meet such "basic"' Middle Eastern problems as Arab-Israeli relations, the Suez Canal dilemma, and the handling of Arab refugees. The House, said the committee, should get on with the business of adopting the Eisenhower resolution-and then should receive from the Administration "positive and comprehensive measures for dealing with the fundamental problems of the Middle East...