Word: mortally
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sojourner on Earth. The 2nd century father, Tatian, attacked the Greeks' cyclical conception of immortality, which assumed the pre-existence of the soul, with life extending into eternity, backward as well as forward. Tatian held that the soul is as mortal as the body, but that it can be saved by God. Immortality is not the Christian hope, said Tatian, but "life eternal"-which means living in God. And God grants this only to those who do not grasp for immortality, but submit to death. "Die to the world and repudiate its madness. Live to God, take hold...
...answers, 'Let all things pass away.' " The implicit proviso is "except this poem," and MacLeish goes on to say: "To face the truth of the passing away of the world and make song of it, make beauty of it, is not to solve the riddle of our mortal lives but perhaps to accomplish something more." What is that evasive "something more?" Poetry as religion, in the manner of Malraux's view of art? Poetry as an existential pacifier, good for stoics of all ages? Or has Playwright MacLeish now fastened on the poet that blasphemous tribulation...
Keeping the Greek myths untangled is something the Greeks themselves were never very good at. One reason is that, for religious, political and artistic reasons, the myths were always being changed. Another is that the Olympians, the lesser gods and the mortal heroes were virtually omnigamous; the nymphs were, if not nymphomaniacal. at least nymphoeccentric. But precisely because the myths are complex, they are best learned by the young, and it is hard to imagine a better -or more decorous-introduction than Robert Graves's new book...
...much sense to condescend. But the book, which is pleasantly illustrated by Dimitris Davis, is simply enough written to be read by an intelligent parent to an intelligent eight-year-old. Graves lets his readers see the Olympians as the more sophisticated Greeks saw them-beings more than mortal, but no more than human. He explains, for instance, that the sea god Poseidon "hated to be less important than his younger brother (Zeus), and always went about scowling. When he felt even crosser than usual, he would drive away in his chariot to a palace under the waves, near...
...berobed old Britisher with a patch over one eye and a theory that, by Allah, there is petroleum under a certain unpromising patch of ground. The old fellow's bastard son shows up, learns to be an oil geologist in a trice, and shortly is locked in mortal combat with his father. It is this son who defends the fort, and he would be there yet, pinging away with his Enfield at the emir's thugs, if the Trucial Oman Scouts had not fetched him out. They are a dandy plot device, and Novelists Prokosch and Bowles might...