Word: martyrdom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...afterward blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm. For decades, many liberal intellectuals have overheated their imaginations and their prose on an image of Trotsky as the unbending political outcast and talented literary man. To his closest followers, he was a saint who suffered his final martyrdom in Mexico on Aug. 20, 1940, when a Stalinist assassin buried an Alpine ax in the old Bolshevik's head...
...circumstantial evidence, Hill led a colorful life perfect for idealization. During the months of court appeals be encouraged the myth growing around him. His flair for the dramatic continued down to his parting words of "Don't waste any time in mourning--Organize!" and insured his elevation to martyrdom. Such a man surrounded by such a legend calls for a hard, accurate film of dignity and restrained anger. Joe Hill is not such a movie...
...that Bernini was later to carve in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caravaggio's angels and Bacchuses habitually looked as if they had been picked up in a Trastevere wineshop, which, no doubt, they were. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, circa 1597, is surrounded by the attributes of her martyrdom, the spiked wheel and sword; her sainthood is conventional, but what the painting seems to be about is her firm, composed human presence. It is a secular portrait...
...Your Essay on "Styles in Martyrdom" [Oct. 11] was timely and interesting. One point about martyrs seems to be ignored these days: the true martyr does not go around looking for martyrdom. Neither, as a rule, does he make dramatic, newsworthy gestures for their own sake...
...trial without realizing that if it had been at all possible, he would have avoided going to the block. In contrast, the Berrigans seem to have relied primarily on dramatics, and I for one cannot help feeling that their despairing cries against the System evidence a subconscious desire for martyrdom...