Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pair of tongs in pure self-defense. He winds up in the dock, as most picaresque heroes do sooner or later. Through all his progress he is reminded again and again-first by a wise man, later by various wandering seers-that he is fulfilling the conditions of some mystic fate...
Glass believes himself to have a mystic affinity with the infant psyche, and calls his toys "a substitute for a son." He explains, as an example, that he got the idea for Mr. Machine while having a telephone conversation with his former wife. "Just before she slammed down the receiver, she said to me. 'You are nothing but a machine.' And I decided that a toy named Mr. Machine would be an adequate psychological symbol of our times." Glass, who is already planning his 1964 line, manufactures no toys himself, instead leases his ideas to toymakers (Mattel, Ideal...
...repeated seven years later when Debussy left Rosalie to marry wealthy Emma Bardac, mother of one of his pupils. Rosalie fired two bullets into herself, recovered and disappeared from Debussy's life. So did most of Debussy's friends. To Debussy, the scandal seemed in some mystic way to be payment for "some forgotten debt to life." In the years after 1904, Debussy was more comfortable financially, but both the quality and quantity of his music faded...
...cottages on the Mediterranean that are advertised as "your own castle in Spain." Though the stock market and their economy have leveled off, West German entrepreneurs are going ahead with plans to build new homes and hotels from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, yielding to the mystic lure of the sun that impelled the Goths across the Alps for centuries, and that inspired Goethe to ask yearningly Kennst du das Land wo die Żitronen blühn? (Do you know the land where the lemons bloom...
...book has its strengths; Bell has a powerful sense of dynasty and a mystic's attraction to the land. The irony of his failure is that the more he tries to express the interconnectedness of all the land and all the dynasties, the more the reader rebels. It may be true, as Thomas Wolfe believed, that "every moment is a window on all time," but Bell crawls in and out these windows with the objectless glee of a boy exploring a vacant mansion...