Word: koestlers
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...Arthur Koestler...
Moral indignation did and still does affect me in a direct physical manner," he once confessed. "I can feel, during an attack, the infusion of adrena line into the bloodstream, the craving of the muscles for violent action." For most of this century, Arthur Koestler lived by those words. Last week at his home in London, he died by them at the age of 77. The "rootless cosmopolitan," as he styled himself, had been an ardent supporter of "autoeuthanasia," and when the suffering of old age and disease grew in supportable, he reportedly took a lethal dose of drugs...
Born in Budapest of middle-class Jewish parents, Koestler was a lonely, neurotic child brought up by a possessive and angry mother and strict, punishing household help. He was subject to suicidal depression, homicidal rage and "obsession with a cause." His first obsession was Zionism, a movement that seized his imagination when he at tended the Vienna Polytechnic in the early 1920s...
...briefly became the private secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant nationalist who also served as the mentor of another youthful Zionist, Menachem Begin. After spending several months in Palestine, Koestler returned to Europe, where he talked himself into a job with the giant Ullstein chain of newspapers. In 1931 he secretly joined the German Communist Party. "I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water," he later wrote. "I left it as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned." But it took several...
...Arthur Koestler, Dialogue with Death