Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This sounds like the Existentialist answer to the modern dilemma-an answer which assumes that all questions of faith are pointless and only man's pride and courage are of value. It is an answer that would have left Kafka as restless as before and convinced Dostoevsky that the Nihilists had won the day. But Author Buzzati, no Existentialist himself, presents it as a universal truth, a faith to die for; and so, though The Tartar Steppe suffers from being a copy of The Castle, it gains from the gravity and human sympathy with which it is written. Like...
...Vatican has long conceded that the popular printing press can outrun any censor's pencil. Since 1900 the church has banned only 255 books, most of them theological works. (Best-known contemporaries on the Index: Philosopher Benedetto Croce, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.) Responsibility has been shifted to local bishops and, in the last analysis, to the individual to decide whether a particular book can injure the reader's faith. Explains a Vatican book censor: "People have different spiritual allergies...
...Germain des Prés, on the Left Bank, long-haired men and short-haired women worked diligently to keep the cult going. Bebop boîtes, hairdos, beards, evening gowns, newspapers, cocktails, hot-dog stands became "existentialist." An under-tipped taxi driver would curse: "Espèce d'existentialiste." Existentialism became a familiar tourist attraction, like the Folies-Bergere. Sartre, increasingly successful and respectable, occasionally deplored the popularizations of his fad-he even felt compelled to move out of his favorite café, the Flore, to escape the tourists' vulgar stares. Last week existentialism took its ultimate...
...paid (about $5,000 a year) to sit and think. This Merleau-Ponty is eminently well qualified to do. A shy, retiring type, less noticed than his flashier school chum, he has been writing heavy technical works on philosophy ( The Structure of Behavior, The Phenomenology of Perception). In the existentialist cafés, Merleau-Ponty's appointment was greeted with dismay, "Ça alors," protested a young woman in blue denims and a wind jacket, "you think you are in the avant-garde and then one day, presto, you are in the rear guard...
...narrator kept the stray bits of Greek, Chinese, Persian, Nietzscheian, Freudian, and existentialist philosophy together, and still appeared on the screen long enough to keep the picture together...