Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Heedless of God or Evil, pen, write...
...1930s. Underlying all of Miller's thought is the conviction that if society is changed, man is redemptively altered and restored to respect, purpose and value. But the catastrophic events of 20th century history have shattered the presumptions of the problem play. Man's ineradicable genius for evil has reduced the doctrine of social engineering to puny tinkering. Playwrights like Beckett, lonesco and Genet have abandoned admonitory Ibsenite finger-waving for a nerve-shattering look into the abyss of existence itself, which in their view is stingingly futile, innately unjust and thoroughly absurd. In the future...
...Hillman, "the Christian insistence on an immediate change from [polygamy] to monogamy might very well cause much more harm than good. It is not at all certain that the average Christian missionary has either the mandate or the competence to change social structures that are not in them selves evil but are in fact serving constructive purposes...
...replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-to learn." -The Sword in the Stone...
...novel must make its way without reference to its gossip quotient, and Updike knows this better than anyone. "Jacques Maritain somewhere says that to write about evil a man needn't have done evil-only felt the evil within himself," Updike remarks. "If people want to make a different conclusion, fine. If the book has passion in it, it's my own. I would hope that at least I have the will to put things down the way they are, under the assumption that there's something beautiful about them in any case. I think a writer...