Word: narcissus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...figures gesturing like stagecraft as he recounted his fables. The narrative content of his art instantly made him a mentor for dull academic followers who found cartooning easier than esthetics. But he alone knew how to manifest the inward emotions of his mythical people in outward physical postures. While Narcissus, for example, gazes in the rapturous vanity of youth at his own reflection in a pool, his forgotten lover Echo, is depicted in ashen tones and fuzzy contours, as if evaporating from neglect...
...Godden sisters are now successful British novelists, and when Rumer (Black Narcissus, The River) and Jon (The Seven Islands, The Peacock) use India as a locale, reality still does not impinge on the writing. Seen through their eyes, the vast Asian subcontinent becomes a setting instead of a place, muddy rivers are transformed into revered waters, reeking slums smell of curry and spice, and lacerating poverty is unflinchingly accepted...
...Gasset when he said: "The condition of man is essential uncertainty. Man feels himself lost, shipwrecked." Nor can Sartre, as an atheist, accept the dispensation of Christian grace, which redeems the sinner without denying the sin. In Sartre's world, the problem of evil is as shallow as Narcissus' pool. The self accuses, judges, justifies and condemns the self...
...orphaned son of Polish intellectuals, defied his guardian and went to sea at the age of 16. Nostromo, for instance, describes with photographic precision a revolution he witnessed in Central America while serving as an apprentice aboard a French barque carrying guns to the insurgents. The Nigger of the Narcissus narrates, day by day, a stormy voyage that Conrad once took around the Cape of Good Hope; the "nigger" was an old black seaman born a slave in Georgia who died at sea as he does in the book...
...which is just now translated and published in the U.S. By his own lights, Genet is indeed a saint. But he is a watch-charm saint, a petty demon whose villainy is on so small a scale that its very earnestness is laughable. The crimes that this Narcissus drops like blossoms in the pool of his own image are no worse than sneak thievery and queer rolling...