Word: illusioners
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Sir: Perhaps the third session of the Ecumenical Council now completed should be known as the "Grand Illusion." The unyielding attitude of a powerful few on the religious-liberty issue, in the face of overwhelming approval, presages failure for "letting in a little fresh air," as envisioned by Pope John...
The fantasies through which we wander in The Words are wonderfully treated, for Sartre is a writer of frightening soft power. They often catch something in the preconscious of the reader and they hold it as the shock of recognition floods in. But while a portion of these fantasies are...
Now, in an earnest if somewhat amateurish biography, Yvette is finally portrayed in truer colors. She was nearer vestal than scarlet. As a critic noted at the time, the onstage illusion Yvette so shatteringly evoked was of knowing virginity; as stage-door admirers soon discovered, it was no illusion.
The reality that unblocks Thornhill also undoes him: his auto accident, the reader puzzles out, was actually suicide. Before he dies, Thornhill sets down his final truth: marriage, or any human relationship, is founded, and thus founders, on the "illusion that a man can care for someone other than himself...
But discovery comes neither easily nor early. In the novel-ending bullfight scene, Thornhill perceives that man is as mesmerized by delusion as is the bull by the cape. At the moment of revelation-when he first sees behind the cloth of illusion-the sword is halfway home.