Word: mystics
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...long. If Camden, Me., has not yet fully accommodated Gordon Bok as one of its own, then Bok has assimilated the town, the state, the whole surf-sawed seacoast into his music. He has become the laureate of men who go down to the sea in ships, a saltwater mystic whose tales of treacherous tides and deadly storms tap into regional mythology and enlarge...
...late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents...
...character Siegfried were based on Mikhail Bakunin, the mid-nineteenth century anarchist. But in the decade between the composition of acts II and III of Siegfried, the third opera in the cycle--during which Wagner wrote Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde--he latched on to Schopenhauer's eastern mystic fatalism, and suddenly the philosophy of the Ring cycle took a sharp turn to the right...
Conventioneers have become a permanent subculture in American cities. By their badges you shall know them: Institute of Internal Auditors, Farm and Power Equipment Dealers, Norwegian Singers Association of America, National Sash and Door Jobbers, Odd Fellows, Jaycees, Telephone Pioneers, American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, Ancient Mystic Order of Bagmen of Bagdad, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (also Does), Knights of Pythias (also of Columbus, Equity, St. John, York and Templar), United Commercial Travelers, Automotive Dismantlers and Recyclers, neurologists, gynecologists, anesthesiologists, otorhinolaryngologists, Funeral Directors and Morticians, Sugar Beet Technologists and Hot Dip Galvanizers...
...blunder into the arms of Satan instead." Added the Vatican news paper L'Osservatore Romano: "Christianity is a religion of life, not of death." West Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung philosophized less cosmically: "It was not just a symptom of America or its system's shortcomings. Mystic sects and pseudoreligious groups exist in this part of the world as well and in worrisome numbers. The Jonestown deaths pose the vital question of whether in our modern way of life our institutions provide a sense of sufficient stability." Commented Tokyo's daily Asahi Shimbun: "The Guyana incident...