Word: paganisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...simply found "new ways to express old trivialities." Fry's chosen topics are not social problems. They are perhaps much smaller, perhaps much larger. He writes about the love life of a middle-aged duke (A.D. 1950); about the budding of Christianity from tiny scattered seeds in pagan England (A.D. 596); about Moses in Egypt...
...Some resistance to the practice comes from its cheapening by would-be wits, e.g., the golfer who specified: "Scatter me well over the tenth green at the club. It's been my nemesis so often I want to haunt the place." The Rev. Geoffrey Hilder called ash-scattering "pagan -even if it is utilitarian." Canon Cyril Sansbury denounced "sprinkling someone's remains in his own rose garden . . . in hope that dear George who died last year would grow up into new roses next year. I call this a kind of pantheism...
Individualism, according to Niebuhr, is a false and pagan goddess. "The individual is not an end in himself, and cannot live within himself. Love is the law of his existence. The community is as primordial as the individual. Both Nazi and Communist forms of collectivism are inevitable reactions to the individualism of the bourgeois age. They are just as much in error as the individualism; but hardly more...
Family life is the cornerstone of Don Zeno's method. The very idea of orphanhood, he thinks, is a pagan one: "Every child needs a mother ... not just a caretaker or someone to give him money." Among the Little Apostles the role of mother is a vocation: most of the foster mothers who sign up take a pledge to remain unmarried. Though Don Zeno does not consider the pledge as binding as a nun's vows, he feels strongly that a foster mother's marriage upsets the life of her "family," and he insists that she leave...
...Pound had a profound sense of America's vigor and promise. He could sound paternally tender of its youth ("America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation . . .") and he could grow lyrical, in his strangely dissonant way, over a New York crowd-"a crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at. There is none of the melancholy, the sullenness, the unhealth of the London mass, none of the worn vivacity of Paris...