Word: madman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...America. In short, given the temper of the times, Clumly seems bound for a caricature pig-of-the-week award, or else a New Centurion's badge for meritorious service. Instead, Gardner pits poor old Clumly against the Sunlight Man, a brilliant existential philosopher, French horn player, gadfly, madman, magician, murderer, idealist and Shavian exponent of Babylonian religion and the new consciousness. But when the smoke and the rhetoric and some cadavers have been cleared away, there stands Clumly (much humbled and wiser) as, by God, some kind of confused, committed, ignorant, rumpled, preposterous champion of Western culture...
...Gogol minimized that facet of The Inspector General. He attempted to explain the play himself, always a dangerous course for a writer to take in relation to his own production. Vladimir Nabokov commented that this interpretation might well be considered "the kind of deceit that is practiced by a madman...
...court; he was so proud of it he had hoped to sell it to Time Inc. for $100,000. It exposed the eerie inner world of the full-time loser determined to become "number one" by carrying out fantasies of violence. Though it seemed the handiwork of a madman, the jury took only an hour and 35 minutes to find Bremer sane-on narrow legal grounds-and guilty. In Maryland, to be judged insane a person must be unable to control his criminal behavior or unable to appreciate the criminality of his act. Bremer, as the diary makes clear...
There once was an age of reason, Harrington believes, in which Western civilization subscribed to the bourgeois standards - work hard, seek virtue - and it naturally condemned the psychopath as a madman (the Marquis de Sade) or an outlaw (Billy the Kid). But throughout most of this century, he argues, the psychopaths have been gaining - first tolerated, now triumphant as dictators of the contemporary style of life...
...ideology of madness is an attempt to escape by plunging beneath it. Impulse to action-no hesitation in between, no regret afterward-is the romantic dream of those who envy animals and madmen. But man thinks almost as naturally as he feels. Would-be animal, would-be madman, he is doomed to exceed himself simply because he can think about exceeding himself...