Word: koestlers
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Many men with natural distinction of mind-Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Whittaker Chambers and Gustav Regler -have tried to read the Marxist riddle. By what stages does the self-sacrificing zeal of the idealist recruit to Communism become converted into the coldly inhuman amorality of the full-fledged apparatus man in the party's higher echelons? What turns the Utopian dream of universal brotherhood into the nightmare reality of the police state...
Knopf's collections also includes the masterful protections on the GuiMotine, written in collaboration with Arthur Koestler. In a sustained invective, Camus shows compelling skill in his application of The Rebel to another contemporary issue--capital punishment. "Freedom," he said elsewhere, "is the road to perfectibility"--but this must not mislead. Not liberal perfectibility, not optimism, but the stubborn refusal to deprive a man of his only chance at improvement. Under no circumstances can an irrevocable punishment be out, however inhuman the crime. It is, again, precisely because of the wretchedness of life that life must be allowed...
...real one. Germany is called Armagnac; Paris, Sybaris; everyone is spied on by an agency of the Western alliance called the Office of Strategic Information. Science is a weapon for soldiers, not a tool of philosophers. A power-warped rationalist named Elliot, who strongly resembles the villainous Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, speculates with pleasure on "the electronics of the soul"-soon, he promises, cyberneticists will know enough about mechanical brains to control human nerve cells with ease. "We are moving," someone says, "toward a new Middle Age," in which politician-scientists will be the fathers...
...real rendezvous is with the calendar. He is interesting because he is dated in ways that link him with Hemingway's generation of writers-Malraux, Koestler and Vailland himself. The Hemingway hero is a romantic, but he prides himself on being a guardian of fact, a realistic reporter. Says Duc: "I try not to make things up." He thinks of life as a campaign in which he has won certain medals, all of which he insists on explaining. Duc has been decorated for being in and out of Communism (like Author Vailland), in the French underground...
...Arthur Koestler undoubtedly has a marvelous mind, but his most recent pronouncements regarding the futility of looking to Asia for enlightenment and spiritual guidance seem exceedingly irresponsible, unfair and misleading. By dwelling on the extremes of Oriental religions and their mystifying mysticism, he grossly distorts the wisdom of the East. He rejects Zen Buddhism and at the same time discounts the essence of Zen, which is not a spiritual doctrine, not a religion, not even a philosophy. One who understands Zen has no gods to fail him. For Zen is not a faith, but faith; not hopes, but hope...