Word: oneself
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...laconic, seemingly impersonal surfaces of Pritchett's stories give off a surprising amount of animal heat. It is a matter of design, craftsmanship and, as the author has written, "the supreme pleasure of putting oneself in by leaving oneself out." The technique requires the placement of the precise detail at the exact emotional distance, and it gave his autobiography the immediacy of his fiction. Here, for example, is that extraordinary passage from Midnight Oil in which Pritchett describes one of the more dramatic consequences of his father's exasperating personality: "He had no notion of what...
...targets, the obvious cretins, the people its easy to be supercilious to. I mean a comedy that intimidates, that plays upon the massive insecurities of a Harvard audience, the palpable need to belong; laughter transmogrified from an expression of joy to an expression of nervousness, a device to identify oneself with an elite...
...very simple to convince oneself that it is O.K. to cause suffering and death in other species, other races, other ethnic ;roups, or early periods of gestation. Every individual seems to draw the distinctions in his own mind of who belongs in the protected group and who is in the O.K.-for-abuse (Out) group...
...Shree Chitrabhanu apart from many gurus in the West is that he sees the guru as but a means to find one's inner guru. "He is like an ice cube in a cooling drink. He cools your consciousness and then disappears," Chitrabhanu writes. One's devotion belongs to oneself, not to any teacher. Gurus--the word means "dispeller of ignorance and bringer of light"--can be anyone, regardless of race or sex, who helps one dispel the darkness and ignorance of his life...
Chitrabhanu teaches students (he calls them friends rather than followers) that selfawareness comes through the combination of education in scriptures, the experience of others around oneself and one's own experiences. For this reason, he says, he cannot talk to people from prepared notes. "Life comes from life, not from books," he adds, stressing the importance of talking from the heart...