Word: paganisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...poet who wrote: "Think like a free man and you will not be a slave." and "All that defiles a man comes from within." To St. Paul, he was the only pagan dramatist worthy of quoting: "Evil communications corrupt good manners...
...idol for controlling weather and crop fertility, reportedly venerated as late as this century, and White was determined to unravel the mystery of its origin. Mainland oldsters remembered the idol, all right, but they were evasive, afraid that White would impugn their Catholicism with a report of pagan behavior. In the end, the author reports mischievously, the Godstone turned out to be the stone pillow of an early saint...
Zane's novel is not particularly outstanding; but its deficiencies are less his than those of the movement and the life which he writes about. The paucity of thought and craftsmanship which mark the novels of Beatland (On The Road is the bible of this pagan country) betray the trivial superstructure which American beats have errected upon a set of basic and simple propositions about the society they reject and the values they seek to transcend. In short, the beat generation is a barren subject-matter, and the more one has to say about it, the more one becomes repetitious...
...water, a McKinley-era chair. Into this setting shuffles the spry, white-maned humorist in the white suit. Involuntary tremors ripple the stiffened fingers, the lower jaw nibbles spasmodically at wisps of tobacco-stained mustache, the shoulders twitch like marionettes in the invisible hands of time. But a pagan glint of eye suggests that this is a life less spent than well spent. Then the voice, cracked but not ruined, speaks, and the evening begins showering comic sparks...
Whatever truth there may be in such explanations, the fantasies of the television tube are perhaps most truly understood as shadows of a larger drama. The western is really the American morality play, in which Good and Evil, Spirit and Nature, Christian and Pagan fight to the finish on the vast stage of the unbroken prairie. The hero is a Galahad with a six-gun, a Perseus of the purple sage. In his saddlebags he carries a new mythology, an American Odyssey that is waiting for its Homer. And the theme of the epic, hidden beneath the circus glitter...