Word: parnassus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...essayists ("He avows that not only does he not pity sick people, but he hates them"), was another devoted friend. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes a brief appearance ("His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with"), and there is one glorious occasion when Lamb "dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, [Samuel] Rogers and Tom Moore-half the Poetry of England constellated and clustered." Coleridge, "in his finest vein," stole "all the talk," and "I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener...
Camus pushes these questions up the fashionable modern Parnassus-inhabited by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gide, and all manner of existentialists. In the end, a little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily...
...Parnassus in the Vatican. Agostino Chigi, the Rockefeller to 16th century Rome, was a firm believer in astrology (a pagan holdover), yet pious too. The meaning of the decorations he ordered for his burial chapel in Rome's Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is obviously that the lives of men are subject to the planets, which are in turn subject to God. Raphael, who painted the pagan divinity Galatea for Chigi's palace, also made the Vatican shine with Christian and pagan subjects, depicting the company of the saints and a synod of ancient sages opposite...
...theme, plot, character development and language-the things that gave the theater popular appeal-and have produced a theater suffering from "muscular atrophy" and conditioned by the idea that the playwright, and not his audience, knows what makes good drama. ("The playwright no longer has to die to reach Parnassus. He starts out there...
...well-read? To Sir William Haley, scholarly editor of the London Times, no master list or five-foot shelf can possibly give a proper answer. Even if a man should read three books a week for 60 years, he would still have "no more than a small holding on Parnassus." But last week, over the BBC, Sir William offered a few suggestions-a rambling series of pleasant prescriptions for booklovers...