Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...geography of Dante's inferno was fixed. As a 14th century Florentine, he knew it was somewhere under Tuscany. For Malcolm Lowry, a 20th century mystic, it lay under the volcano that looks down on Cuernavaca in Mexico and inside a bottle of mescal, a drink as hallucinatory, it seems, as mescaline, a drug which is also derived from the maguey cactus...
Only a few of the P.O.W.s have ever made a mark in the postwar Army. Johnson, always a deeply religious man, emerged with a heightened faith in God and an almost mystic belief in human will power. As a soldier, he says, he learned the value of "controlled impatience...
...murdered father, Paul I, and half-crazed by a sense of guilt for Napoleon's burning of Moscow. A handsome rakehell, Alexander had latterly fallen under the influence of Baroness Barbara Juliana von Kriüdener, a Baltic Billy Sunday who converted the Czar into a rabid religious mystic. Thus in 1825 he decided to change his life...
Whatever the results, it seems unlikely that any definitive answer to the mystery will be forthcoming. But for observers of Soviet society, the renewed interest in Alexander is phenomenon enough. By bringing to public attention the life of a mystic and martyr, a pre-Soviet hero and reformer, Russia's new bosses are showing a broad-mindedness far greater than that of their predecessors. The resurgence of the Alexander legend shows an acceptance of not only a Czar but an aspect of pro-Bolshevik history that transcends the rigid confines of Marxist-Leninist "truth...
...Grail which motivates this glowing silkworm's Quest from coast to coast appears to be some mystic sense of Nowness, which, once possessed, will be the journalistic scoop of an epoch. Mainland commitment is no good, because "the moment you become a partisan of any cause you commit yourself to ideas fifty years old, because that's how long it takes an idea to become a cause.... George Orwell said everything that needs to be said about the current international scene in 1948." Well, statements like this don't quite read as cleverly as they speak, and neither does...