Word: quests
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 in 1922.) Next, the half brother interviews Sebastian's secretary and literary executor, a fatuous bundle of sociological cliches...
...beautifully told story of Shanti's growing up and taking to the sea, fragments of the uncle's life, some contradictory, some provocative, come to his attention. Gradually, before the reader is fully aware of the change, the story has become that of Shanti's quest for his uncle. The mystery is eventually solved by a document written by the uncle himself. But by this time, Shanti and the reader are both well beyond the simple curiosity that began the search. Shanti is back in his village and back with his childhood sense of rapture...
...needed straightening-out. The Bicentennial Celebration in 1836 was long and merry; forty toasts livened the ten-hour dinner and celebration. This merriment stood alone during the business-like regime of Quincy. President Walker once deemed him "The Great Organizer of the University." Although he failed eminently in his quest of the school for gentlemen, Quincy did maintain and expand the tradition of academic freedom...
...Dwight Eisenhower headed homeward, his successes only made it more certain that still more responsibility lay upon him to keep his quest for relaxation moored to the principle that has served him well: "Strength can cooperate; weakness can only beg." That principle might have prevented the holocaust that Europe mourned last week. Today Ike's principle might not only prevent World War III but might yet find a new kind of victory...
...thing a beatnik cannot abide is a square. The bearded, sandaled beat likes to be with his own kind, to riffle through his quarterlies, write craggy poetry, paint crusty pictures, and pursue his never-ending quest for the ultimate in sex and protest. When deterred from such pleasures by the goggle-eyed from Squaresville, the beatnik packs his pot (marijuana), shorts and bongo drums, grabs his black-hosed, pony-tailed beatchick and cuts out. Lately, beatniks in increasing numbers have been cutting out of the incipient squareness of San Francisco and swinging in the shabby little Los Angeles beach community...