Word: mysticisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Beasts of the World, Unite! Farmer Jones had a good farm, but he drank too much. One night, by the mystic operations of the historical dialectic, a leftist political theoretician appeared among his farm animals. He was old Major, a prize Middle White hog. Major addressed the other creatures...
...answer: "I am filled with ... a profound, mystic, silence-enjoining awe, in the presence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and "the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom saint and criminal are one. . . . It is incomparably easier and more wholesome to write about divinely pagan healthfulness than about holy disease. We may amuse ourselves at the expense of the former, the fortunate children of nature and their artlessness; we cannot amuse ourselves at the expense of the children of the spirit, the great sinners...