Word: koestlers
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Since the publication this fall of a translation of Humanisme et Terreur, a book scarcely available till now even in French, we are better able to locate the sharp edge of Merleau-Ponty's perception. The immediate object evoking his response was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon . This account of the Moscow trials of the 1930's. presented as fiction, appeared in 1946. Along with his argumentation in The Yogi and the Commissar. Koestler's novel was taken as the expression, and for some, the justification of disillusion and inwardness, a mood then pervasive among Western intellectuals...
...Resistance, with "a reading of the present... as complete and as faithful as possible ... " (quoted by Sartre in Situations. p. 168). Humanism and Terror consists of these articles woven, with other material in pursuit of the same themes, into a study of what he called the Communist problem. Koestler raises such a problem for us. says Marleau-Ponty, but he did not understand it. Indeed, Koestler is a "mediocre Marxist...
...Great Britain is that peculiar country in Europe," Arthur Koestler once wrote, "where people drive on the left side of the road, measure in inches and yards, and hang people by the neck until dead." Hanging has indeed been a peculiarly British institution. During the 18th century, while capital punishment was being restricted elsewhere, the number of capital offenses under England's criminal law, which was commonly known as the "bloody code," increased fivefold, to more than 220. They included everything from associating with gypsies to stealing turnips...
...followed the carefree boisterous spirit of the Regency. It may be that the early '70s will see a period of repressive reaction against the Dionysian tendencies of the young. There may also be a purely spontaneous swing back to discretion and suggestion. "Writers and film makers," predicts Arthur Koestler, "will discover again that pubic hair is less poetic than Gretchen's braids." It is possible, too, that a decline in the work ethic or a weakening of demand for material goods may disrupt the foundation of a hedonist civilization-the economy...
Books are the single largest classification in the catalogue; they include works by a predictable pantheon of authors-Buckminster Fuller, Carl Jung, John Cage, Arthur Koestler-and some not so predictable. Particularly recommended are Cosmic View, a 1957 children's book by Dutch Schoolmaster Kees Boeke ("You advance in and out through the universe," says the blurb, "changing scale by a factor of ten") and Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbons' foraging guide to edible wild plants. There are "pop enlightenment" texts on yoga, sense relaxation, self-hypnosis and psycho-cybernetics. Among the catalogue's biggest sellers...