Word: psychically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...series of shocks: the shock of birth itself, of hunger, of weaning, of not having one's own way. Most humans make adjustments to these painful shocks. Yet many are overwhelmed by them, and so they attempt to turn the pain itself into pleasure, i.e., they become psychic masochists. At the same time, humans learn in the nursery to fear the woman: it is she who takes the nipple out of the infant's mouth, she who disciplines him. Many persons grow up to run away from the fearful mother image, and at the same time unconsciously...
...life caring for a sick mother whom she hated. Now Mama has died, Eleanor is living with a dull married sister, and her experience of life is a dreary vacuum. It is almost like liberation when Dr. Montague takes her on as one of three assistants to check psychic phenomena at a haunted house in a grubby small town. Author Jackson, a self-confessed dabbler in magic, sets her scene with professional care. The big old house is a crazily built warren of odd rooms and twisting corridors. For 80 years it has witnessed a variety of human disasters...
Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge...
Darbies & Cuffs. On the way to achieving'"this," the dark, sturdy escapist made more than a living. He made himself into an expert swimmer, a master lockpicker, a pioneer aviator, a psychic investigator, and an unfailing expert in the arrogant art of obtaining personal publicity. His greatest illusions and escapes, explains Author Gresham as he gives away the master's secrets, were constructed with the simplicity that is the essence of true genius. They were part fraud and part finely honed athletic skill. Example: When he dived manacled and chained into an icy river, he swam free tense...
Haloed Cabbage. Ford records the early history of the spiritualist movement in the U.S., when it was chivvied by police. Today the law is more tolerant and scientists less skeptical of psychic phenomena. Non-spiritualists, however, will still be depressed by the sad fact that spirits sometimes choose to communicate with the living in such down-at-heel language; it suggests that a lot of education goes to waste when people...