Word: eunuch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with children long dead. In third-person tales, a homosexual's latent yearning for a woman leads to two murders and a suicide. In others, a rabbi contends with imps, demons, dybbuks and harpies; a woman sins with a fish and her child grows scales and fins; a eunuch tells of the daughters of Lilith who "fly around at night like bats and tempt men to commit abominations...
Mosca, the Fox's Fly, is the oily instrument of his misdeeds. As played by Ben Kingsley, he is curiously modern, the unctuous image of the Madison Avenue p.r. man. "Mosca, this was thy invention?" asks Volpone after a show by his weird trio of dwarf, hermaphrodite and eunuch. "If it please my patron," he answers. "Not else...
...mimicry. What he doesn't realize is that his mimicry deprives him of identity (just as the best parody is only barely distinguishable from its victim), and he, the mocking schoolboy, becomes the personification of his school. Similarly, denatured anarchy can exist in the King's Court, the eunuch in the harem, and the Harlequin can blend into the royal robes. Christ, the ultimate fool in his renunciation of worldly existence, can exist in the world but not of it; unfortunately, the institution of the Church and Christianity must live in this world and of it, and so it evolves...
...Walter Scott's. He is a Monte Pythonesque coiner of clichés: rubies have a fearless tendency to "glow like live coals," and Frenchmen sputter expletives like "Name of a name!" and "By example!" Yet in the next sentence Sabatini can turn a flashing phrase (a eunuch's hands are two "bunches of fat fingers...
...Passions," the same thing happens: Eunuch interrupts two very beautiful stories--one about Lieb Belkes who thinks so much about Israel that one day he leaves his village and walks there, and another about a simple tailor who becomes a great biblical scholar in only twelve months' time. And Eunuch tells of a rabbi so obsessed with Yom Kippur that he decides to celebrate it every day of the year. This is the strangest of all desires in Passions, most of which are earthy--the desire that is finally closest to being Bashevis Singer's one abiding passion...