Word: human
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Naturally enough for a novel of these times, the theme is the problem of freedom. Mathieu, a poor professor, has spent his whole life shaking off human responsibilities in a desire to be free, but he has only succeeded in making his life meaningless. Through the three-day span of the story, he sees many people, all of whom try to establish contact with him, and draw him into their society, to give his life a purpose. But though Mathieu would like to take the plunge, he is not convinced of the rightness of being a bourgeois or a communist...
...prodigal debauchee, unnatural, and profane, obscene, saucy, and undutiful; and yet this libertine is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap. . . ." Congreve replied nervously, and not altogether convincingly, that he was doing a useful social work in painting "the vices and follies of human kind...
...Charlotte Whitton is one of the best-known social workers in Canada; she is also one of the most determined women in the Dominion. Last spring, when Dr. Whitton criticized Alberta's penny-saving welfare system, Provincial Health Minister W. W. Cross shrugged her off as just "a human talking machine." He would run his department as before. Cracked Dr. Whitton: "Didn't Hitler say his empire would endure 1,000 years...
Despite the Bible and Bernard Shaw, most doctors think that no human being can hope to live much more than 100 years. The ripest old age ever verified was that of a Canadian who lived to be 113.* But according to Dr. V. G. Korenchevsky of Oxford University, an authority on longevity, more & more people are crowding the Canadian's record. Dr. Korenchevsky, reporting last week on a census of Britain's centenarians (oldest: 112), found that, percentagewise, the number of people over 100 is rising faster than the population. Between 1938 and 1945 Britain had 873 centenarians...
...education of anyone, a philosophy, a Weltanschauung, is necessary. . . . They would find that [Catholicism] . . . has much to recommend it. They would find a Weltanschauung elaborated by many generations of contributors who have produced a very thorough analysis of the end of man; namely, the purpose and goal of human life...