Word: mystical
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...superstitious mystic, Mahler brooded over Beethoven and Bruckner, each of whom died after finishing his ninth symphony. When Mahler had written eight, he tried to dodge the unlucky number nine by titling his greatest symphonic work Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth...
...Beckmann sometimes talks like this-like a mystic or a philosopher, but his best ideas are wordless. They come from what he calls "the labor of the eyes." Says he: "If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible...
...most confusing thing about Chagall was that all of his few symbols hung somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Cows jumped over housetops, and fiddlers played in the sky. Like Einstein, Chagall went beyond Newtonian law. As in some Hasidic dances, his whirling, painted figures achieved an ecstasy of mystic levitation-but they never came down...
There was Kisling, "the swellest guy in the world," the mystic Stuckgold, who always placed his naked models in another room so he couldn't see them when he worked. There was savage, ascetic Soutine, who smashed his chair and table to kindling wood so Kiki could be warm; Soutine slept curled up on the floor while Kiki took his bed. And saturnine Maurice Utrillo, who was once so stirred by her magnificent peasant nudity that he painted a brilliant picture of a huge cow barn...
...Giono has little of Thoreau's warm passion for facts of nature, even less of his intellectual Puritanism. Born in 1895, at Manosque, Basses-Alpes, of French-Italian stock, Giono is essentially a nature-loving mystic. He is a teller of wry, earthy stories of the peasants in whom he professes to see the joy of the good life embodied. He has written about these people, sometimes bafflingly but always with zest and imagination, in The Song of the World, Harvest, and Joy of Man's Desiring...