Word: existentialist
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Naked Nerves. Why does this appeal so powerfully to modern audiences? U.S. Critic Jack Diether points to the "existentialist" strain in Mahler: "He is the only composer who looked into our whole civilization, who questioned the whole basis of our existence." Says Rafael Kubelik, who conducted Mahler's Eighth at Vienna last week: "He's a sufferer who forces man to look into a mirror. He exposes naked nerves." The Angst, as well as the questing spirit of Mahler's music, no doubt explains its special meaning for today's college-age youth, who are among...
...objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the razor, symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the contemplation of death. The puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have arrived at the true existentialist position-confronting the possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities of his life...
...sullen séance of left-wing conjurors who had reached their verdict long before the trial started. Had not Russell already said, after all, that the U.S. was clearly guilty of war crimes? Nevertheless, Sartre started off the session-Russell was too frail to come-with some typically existentialist flummery. "The tribunal's legitimacy," he proclaimed, "derives simultaneously from its powerlessness and its universality. We can receive no orders. We will examine the facts in our souls and consciences...
What gives is an author who knows that ideas make the best parlor games. Earth's books, whatever their shortcomings, cry out not merely to be read but to be played with. His friend, Novelist and Critic Leslie Fiedler, enthusiastically calls Earth "an existentialist comedian." The description is apt, for Earth is essentially a humorist who believes that it is absurdly comical to take anything too seriously, including himself. His books bubble with back-alley sexual humor that derides the solemnity of love. Earth's characters are never cast as heroes: there is something slightly ludicrous about them...
RIGHT YOU ARE. Luigi Pirandello is the philosopher king of 20th century playwrights, an existentialist before Sartre and Camus, an absurdist before Beckett and lonesco. Though written in 1918, this intellectual whodunit has scarcely a grey line in its script, and the APA troupe has faithfully obeyed the playwright's commandment: "To convert the intellect into passion...