Word: iseult
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...Sanskrit title derives from two words: turanga, meaning flowing time, movement or rhythm; and lila, or love, sport, the play of the gods. The symphony's 10 movements, which last well over an hour, are rife with programmatic references to the ancient Celtic love story of Tristan and Iseult, to the myths of ancient India, even to the spooky stories of Edgar Allan...
...takes love easy and regards sex as an urge that can be indulged without guilt or passion, seems only half alive. Love and life, in short, gain savor from a sense of sin and self-denial. The stricture against eating the apple and the sword in Tristram and Iseult's bed are both powerful sharpeners of appetite. This is not artistic news, though the observation is now unfashionable. That being so, whether Marry Me is part apologia or all fictional serrmonette, one of its points could well be dismissed as the higher hedonism in a nutshell (forbidden fizz...
...wedding of love and death has given literature some of its best- and most of its worst-moments. Consider, for example, the timeless tragic passions of Tristan and Iseult and the disposable bathos of Love Story. In Ending, Hilma Wolitzer's first novel, there is neither an emerald love cave nor an ivy-covered campus to enhance the relationship of love and death. The setting is Rego Park, Queens, a part of New York City where thousands pursue their lives in middle-income high-rises not far from one of the largest and dreariest cemetery complexes in the world...
Updike has found a tantalizing metaphor for this quest in the legend of Iseult-the unattainable woman who vanishes at the instant she is possessed. "What is it that shines from Iseult's face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed?" he wrote in an essay in 1963 What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under...
Alone of the characters in Couples, Piet is married to Iseult-the unreachable Angela, who cannot yield to him though she recognizes him as "the only person who ever tried to batter through to me." Life with Angela thus becomes for Piet an unbearable nostalgia, embodied in her, and his salvation comes down to a matter of attempting to tolerate the intolerable. They are "ordained for divorce," says Updike, and their submission is an acknowledgment of death's approach...