Word: isaiah
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Solzhenitsyn is a type of Isaiah, the angry prophet who arises when mankind is seriously misbehaving to denounce the age and its sins. People like to be scolded, especially when their conscience is bad - as it is in this last quarter of the terrible 20th century. This explains the Solzhenitsyn cult. He is fashionable; he is our Savonarola. I do not believe everything he says about Western society, although it is useful to hear his strictures; they make us think. Relatively speaking, however, I think America has good qualities, perhaps less operative now than they might be, but inherent, nonetheless...
NONFICTION: A Considerable Town, M.F.K. Fisher ∙ A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld ∙ Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin ∙ Samuel Beckett, Deirdre Bair ∙ Scribble, Scribble, Nora Ephron ∙ The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
RUSSIAN THINKERS by Isaiah Berlin Viking; 312 pages; $14.95 "The fox knows many things," the Greek poet Archilochus wrote in one of his fragments. "The hedgehog knows one big thing." Sir Isaiah Berlin the political philosopher, used that enigmatic formula as the framework for one of the most luminous essays of the century, The Hedgehog and the Fox, a study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision...
...massive obscenity was being perpetrated, not only against the grandeur of the law, which was being fouled in Massachusetts in the name of justice. His voice was that of a Hebrew prophet. It was not lament. It was fueled by a determination to correct an evil. He was Isaiah rather than Jeremiah...
...talent-spotter and host; among those who were just finishing their undergraduate careers in the mid-1920s, and who came and went within his circle, were Rex Warner, Cecil Day Lewis, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly, Kenneth Clark, Henry Yorke (Henry Green), John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Sparrow, Isaiah Berlin, AJ. Ayer . . . There were giants in the earth in those days, but if in those days they were giants it was still within the context of their own circle; just a very talented group of young...