Word: idea
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reached the marble-topped tables of the famed Café de Flore, on Paris' Left Bank, where small, homely M. Sartre had first preached Existentialism. The young Existentialists who still hung around the Flore took the news of Resistentialism calmly. Said a philosophy student: "The idea merits attention. Voyes-vous, the antagonism between things and man is nothing new. Even the great Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason seems prepared to grant some mysterious powers to things. In this book Kant admitted that the essential nature of objects remains completely unknown.* The trouble for us Existentialists...
...gratuity should ever be accepted from a convert, not even a stole fee at baptism. They will hear plenty of money sermons later on, and it would be a good idea to start them off with a memory of never having heard money from the priest who instructed them...
...picture opens with a long musical sequence which introduces the characters, starts the story rolling and seems to foreshadow much more fun than Summer Holiday ever delivers. After this solid beginning, Mamoulian (or his bosses) lost faith in the idea of telling their story with music. Songs appear infrequently, and when they do (e.g., Stanley Steamer, a sequence about the joys of primitive motoring), the tunes are strident and too tricky for the story's gentle flutterings over adolescent rebellion...
...would be a good idea, they said, for civilian doctors to get blood banks organized and join in the civil defense program. Light clothes are best to wear for an atomic bombing (Hiroshima victims proved that dark clothes increase the chances of fatal burns). If death does not come quickly, "the patient may become extremely emaciated." After that he may die, but "emaciation" sounds more cheerful than "atomic death...
Like many left-wingers, Laski has taken varying attitudes toward the U.S.S.R., ranging from piously articulate fellow-traveling to skeptical hostility (his Secret Battalion, published in 1946, was a blistering attack on the British Communist Party). But he has never for a moment lost his faith in the idea of a planned society nor his energy in tub-thumping for one. Much of his writing, like many of his public utterances, has been neat propaganda, smartly concocted and adroitly delivered. But periodically he has written studies in which his intelligence and historical erudition have loomed much larger than his slicker...