Word: psychics
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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...
...Ford took his troubles to Psychology Professor Elmer Snoddy. Together they rapped tables, and Ford soon felt himself in his spiritual talents to be one with "Wesley, Luther, Swedenborg, Dwight Moody, not to overlook a high proportion of the saints." Miss Gertrude Tubby, secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, encouraged the "young and eager psychic," and soon Ford was in London, way beyond the league of Snoddy, Tubby or even Moody. One night, several hundred pounds sterling worth of gems manifested themselves at a seance patronized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ford drew a garnet...
Author Ford writes with complete conviction of his own psychic powers. At his own seances, spirits of the dead ("discarnates," he calls them) manifest themselves through Ford. No historic figures have appeared at Ford's beck and call, and he is suspicious of mediums who claim they can get through to the well-known dead...
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...