Word: existentialist
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...audience, the magazine needs more translation by competent, middleman journalists. Mary Harrington Hall, a former science writer who was one of the first staffers hired by Charney, comes closest. But even when she tries to inject lightness and broader explanation into her tape-recorded interviews with the likes of Existentialist-Psychotherapist Rollo May and Harvard Behaviorist B. F. Skinner, the transcribed result more often than not sounds like interruptions...
When the boy was young, he had tried holding on to philosophies. For a week he would say to himself, "I am a stoic." The next week, "I am a Christian." The next, "I am an existentialist." And he would map out systems of thought, meanings for life, and ardently believe in each, until it gave way to the next...
...force, any more than his forbidding technique does. What generates his awesome power is the dynamic equilibrium between both sides of his creative faculty. He gives a full measure of both head and heart, and stands as an exemplar not only of fullness but, above all, of balance. Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, of all people, once wrote of Bach: "He taught how to find originality within an established discipline; actually-how to live...
...recently, "a political animal [who] could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry." Though Orwell was a socialist, the metaphysical system underlying Marxian socialism meant nothing to him, and he had an empirical Englishman's distrust of other philosophical abstractions; to him, the existentialist Sartre was a windbag. But he also held an immense advantage over English intellectuals in politics who, by comparison, seem like dishonest children...
Camus was often misunderstood. He was labeled an existentialist, but in interviews he protested that his The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) was "directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers." He was criticized for contributing to the literature of despair, but his novels (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall) as well as his essays and plays sought to surmount despair. He was called an atheist, but Camus was a deeply religious man without...