Word: quests
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death. Adultery, says Updike, has become a kind of "imaginative quest" for a successful hedonism that would enable man to enjoy an otherwise meaningless life. But to seek pleasure is not necessarily to find...
...couples of Tarbox live in a place and time that together seem to have been ordained for this quest...
Updike has found a tantalizing metaphor for this quest in the legend of Iseult-the unattainable woman who vanishes at the instant she is possessed. "What is it that shines from Iseult's face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed?" he wrote in an essay in 1963 What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under...
...Ultimate Quest. Here is the recurring dilemma that Agnon never quite resolves in his stories. His scholar-heroes dream of locking themselves up with some sanctified absolute discipline that will freeze change and make even time stand still. Yet, like the guest, they feel disturbing tugs toward the world outside-toward the everyday pleasures of walking in the forest or smiling once more at Rachel, the hotel-keeper's daughter. It is as if what keeps security in also keeps the very flavor of life out. And so, at the moment they discover their sanctuary, Agnon's characters...
...this is not, as Clarke suggests in Life, the end of an Ahab-like quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the universe. Bowman is led into the time warp by the monolith. The moon monolith's radio signals directed toward Jupiter were not indicative of life as we know it on Jupiter, but were a roadmap, in effect, to show Bowman how to find his way to the monolith that guides him toward transcedent experience...