Word: gnostic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...news of Piers' suicide. Sylvie, who slid sweetly into madness years before, lives near by in a mental hospital. Bruce, as imagined by Blanford, is swamped by memories. The most haunting and troublesome are of the young lovers' involvement years be fore in Egypt with a Gnostic cult that views the universe as "a quiet maggotry," and believes that the sorry state of the world began when the rightful, benign lord of creation was displaced by an evil usurper...
...corruption of the world is presented with such apparent justice and restraint that the reader only gradually ceases to doubt his judgment - a doubt that Plarr at last experiences himself. His pure disgust at the physical side of life matches (and is perhaps intended to represent) the ancient Gnostic heresy that held Christ never to have been made flesh, and regarded the fleshly world as simply a dirty trick played by the devil...
...Author Wilfrid Sheed, in the recently published Max Jamison, commented most appropriately when he said: "I am not against youth as such. They are wonderfully teachable. But that they should be teaching us; that we should invest them with oracular powers, read into their shrugs and moans some great gnostic wisdom-this is an American superstition so crass that one scarcely knows where to begin with...