Word: materialist
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...once you stop to think what images of beauty arise from fairy tales. They are images of money. Gold, caskets of gold, caskets of silver . . . the cave of Ali Baba stored with stolen gold and silver, the underground garden in which Aladdin found jewels growing on trees ... A wholly materialist city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard . . . This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries...
...materialist] system," he said, "confronts disjointed man, driven about as he is by a compulsion to flee and hide from God ... in the guise of exact science ... In the name of science God is explained as a mere reflex of a primitive state of fear . . . Thus the system promises man deliverance from God and, simultaneously, deliverance from the anxiety deep down in himself. Suppose the flaming cherub were not really posted before the closed gate of Paradise at all? Suppose the gate were unlocked and all you need do is to enter, in mighty concert with progressive humanity . . .? Would...
...heresy from common sense fashionable before World War I-as well as with antiSemitism. Yet his was the genuine voice of a man who has lost his bearings in industrial society. His sense of pity and tragedy never left him, and for men of such temperament who retain a materialist philosophy, there "lies in wait," as Whittaker Chambers testified, "the evil thing-Communism...
...plot tells of two prison buddies who want to escape their dull routine "pour la liberte." One of them succeeds and soon becomes president of a phonograph factory. The other, an incorrigible remanticist, is captured. After his subsequent release, he takes a job on the assembly line in his materialist friend's plant. The two discover each other, the police discover the materialist, and they start all over again...
...characters, set against a ballet-like background of black-suited functionaries running back and forth across the screen, are somewhat unreal, as those in fantasy should be. But they seem to enjoy living in the world M. Clair has made for them. After a drunken dinner, for instance, the materialist exudes enthusiasm as he pelts his own portrait with wine glasses. In short Clair has shown that there are pleasanter ways to criticize the advances of modern technology than through the grim didacticism of an Orwellian nightmare...