Word: passion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...playing out of these conflicts can be seen in the gradual emergence of the welfare-corporate state. In this system, culture has triumphed over nature, the state over society and reason over passion. But the underlying tensions of liberal theory remain to make the society unstable...
...Passions," the same thing happens: Eunuch interrupts two very beautiful stories--one about Lieb Belkes who thinks so much about Israel that one day he leaves his village and walks there, and another about a simple tailor who becomes a great biblical scholar in only twelve months' time. And Eunuch tells of a rabbi so obsessed with Yom Kippur that he decides to celebrate it every day of the year. This is the strangest of all desires in Passions, most of which are earthy--the desire that is finally closest to being Bashevis Singer's one abiding passion...
...more substance the better. Because Shaffer has Dysart overstate his case in places about the dullness of modern society. Dysart says that by getting rid of this obsessive passion in Alan, he will make the boy's life boring, as if his life could never be full of new passions (some perhaps just as psychotic). Shaffer also seems to make this assumption that when Dysart finally finds out what caused Alan's problems (as simple as these causes are), he will be cured, when that seems only to be the beginning. This explains Shaffer's retraction in the program: that...
...Alan Strang. His mother wants him to be happy and religious, his father wants him to improve his character, his girlfriend just wants him to be able to toss in the hay with her, the magistrate wants him to be without pain, and Dysart wants him to retain his passion--or at least toys with the idea. And it is in Dysart that this desire to see the boy different than what he can become--not just dull--that the dangers arise of wanting any child to be something. Dysart plays God as the others wanted to play God, offering...
Lurking beneath this tugging and pulling a child to become something, is the most deadly of all passions in Equus, more deadly than the dull, passionless society Dysart depicts. Alan Strang probably wouldn't have been in the world he was if he hasn't been thrust there by a society that pushes people into a frame of being without helping them understand the dimensions of their own roles in that society or of all the emotions they will experience: pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, boredom and passion. Equus helps a little in that direction, and while it could...