Word: fleshed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brand new painkiller, says France's Dr. Henri Laborit, dampens the aches and pains of arthritis, burns, cancer, childbirth, neuralgia, rheumatism-just about all the ills the flesh is heir to. Such fantastic claims may sound like the spiel of a turn-of-the-century snake-oil peddler, but the medical community has learned to take Dr. Laborit at his word. When he reports on the properties of the compound which he calls Ag 246, he speaks with the authority of a researcher who has already been credited with important drug discoveries...
...freedom and the urge for sancity. He analyzes his successive commitments to the contradictory philosophies of Christ, Buddha, Lenin, and Nietzsche. And, in some of his most sonorous passages, Kazantzakis chronicles a battle of the soul that has echoes through works from the Bible to Herzog--the duel between flesh and spirit. Characteristically, Kazantzakis writes of this battle in the most expansive terms...
Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation...God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear...
...flashed as though armed with swords." Kazantzakis lived a life of cosmic oppositions, of pressing and encompassing dualities. One is hardly surprised to find Kazantzakis posing problems like the battle of spirit and flesh in this way--but he extends the approach to many other battles. He explains that he views his life as a battle for spiritual ascent--and the reader of Report to Greco becomes overwhelmed by the extent to which he lived and wrote about life in these terms...
Report to Greco repeats some of the incidents from these books almost verbatim. In particular, it illuminates Zorba the Greek. Now, the movie version to the contrary, Zorba does not merely discuss flesh (Good) and spirit (Bad). Rather, it exalts the impulsive, the "valiant preposterous act" (Report to Greco) over the Buddha-like espousal of the peace with which becomes the Nothing. Report to Greco shows just how much of Zorba's joie de vivre was in Nikos Kazantzakis...