Word: mystical
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Certainty's embarrassing kin guides Thomas past accepted wisdom to good sense and imaginative speculation. He studies quantum mechanics and realizes that it holds no mystic truths or fetching metaphors for him because he does not know the mathematics. Elsewhere, he bucks psychiatric doctrine and formulates a hands-off policy toward the unconscious: "It cannot be a bad thing to own one, but I would no more think of meddling with it than trying to exorcise my liver, an equally mysterious apparatus. Until we know a lot more, it would be wise, as we have learned from other fields...
...going gets technical at times. Burgess assumes, for example, that most of his readers will recognize the "mystic chord" of Scriabin when they see it on a staff. But he writes with his usual quirky vigor and never loses sight of the quotidian world in which mystic chords get written: glossing one of his own scores, he recalls such details of its composition as "a particular face on television, a stab of heartburn, the cat licking my toes." Those who persist through the occasional thickets of crotchets and quavers will find in this little book the middle C of Anthony...
...much detail, Lindbergh's flight represented a peculiarly, almost wistfully, American way of doing things. It was a lonely achievement of the American character, self-contained, self-confident, in motion across great distances. Lindbergh perfectly embodies a contradiction in the older American soul. He was a kind of mystic mechanic. He arced up into another element. He took human possibility into another atmosphere. He made American materialism soar-the first great American export of the technological...
They gather in remote valleys and mountain strongholds, and only a handful of initiates are permitted to know their mystic rites or to read their "Six Books of Wisdom." Their faith is a baffling hybrid of Greek philosophy and Muslim mysticism; they revere Jesus, Moses and Muhammad equally. Though their sect is technically an offshoot of the Isma'ili Muslim sect, it shares ideas with Chinese and Indian religions. Such are the shadowy outlines of the mysterious Druze, a self-enclosed feudal group famous for its autonomy and military prowess...
...political force in modern Lebanon, the Druze were organized and galvanized by the magnetic Kamal Jumblatt, who was once described as "both rebel and statesman, mystic and politician." Three years after he joined parliament in 1946, Jumblatt formed the Progressive Socialist Party, and in the years that followed, he gave his committed support to the cause of Arab nationalism. By 1975 Jumblatt had founded the Lebanese National Movement and established himself as pre-eminent warlord of the Lebanese left. In the course of his political career, he ruled four ministries and helped to topple two Presidents. He also strongly opposed...