Word: parnassus
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Delphi was once one of the spiritual centers of the Western world. In this rocky glen beneath Mount Parnassus, 100 miles northwest of Athens, stood the sacred stone called Omphalos-the navel of the earth, where two eagles started by Zeus from opposite edges of creation had met. Close to the great temple of Apollo, which housed the storied oracle and its fume-drugged priestess, each city-state of ancient Greece maintained its own temple. Last week the Greek government announced plans to turn Delphi into a modern center for the spiritual gathering of nations, invited the 15 nations comprising...
Died. Christopher Darlington Morley, 66, bearded poet, essayist, critic, playwright, author of some 50 books (Parnassus on Wheels, The Haunted Bookshop, Thunder on the Left, Kitty Foyle); of a cerebral thrombosis after a long illness; in Roslyn Heights, N.Y. Twice editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1937, 1948), authority on Joseph Conrad, Kit Morley also delighted in daffy verse, wrote LIFE'S editor on a Battle of Britain story (1941) in which the battlefield 80 miles long, 38 wide and from five to six high was described as a "cube...
...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...