Word: koestler
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Having become discouraged with the state of affairs in the Western World, bewildered with anxiety for its future, novelist Arthur Koestler decided to set forth on a "spiritual pilgrimage" to the East, hoping to find some solution to the world's problems. The Lotus and the Robot is the result of that journey...
...principle upon which he wrote this book is perhaps a very excellent one: there is little doubt that the great philosophies of the East can ease the paramount difficulties of the West. It is only unfortunate that Mr. Koestler believed he could gain an understanding of two of the world's oldest extant cultures in the scant two years he allocated for his studies...
...journey begins in Bombay on a day when the city's sewers, much to the misfortune of our "pilgrim," were left open by mistake. The stench which greeted Mr. Koestler on his arrival apparently followed him through his stay in India. He remains constantly amazed at the overwhelming poverty of the Indian peasantry. The observation that philosophy was doing little to relieve the misery which prevaled throughout the entire country, seems to have undermined whatever respect he may have had for Indian metaphysics...
...Koestler has devoted the larger part of the book's chapters on India to four contemporary Hindu saints and the physical practices of Yoga. The author's preoccupation with the mystic and the occult, dominates the discussion of India, and there is little real consideration of deeper Indian thought. The only deductions which Mr. Koestler draws from his study of the country are some wide sociological generalizations about its people...
...American scene after his early Nick Adams stories of hunting and fishing in the West. Internationally, Hemingway belonged with Eliot, Yeats and Joyce as one of the prime shapers of modern literature, but temperamentally he was more akin to that roving intellectual foreign legion of Malraux, Camus and Koestler, who sent back communiques from all the battlefronts of the 2Oth century consciousness and conscience...