Word: rationalistic
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...Potting Shed is that most truly dramatic of detective stories, a what-done-it, a shadowy trek backward from an effect to a cause. James Callifer is divorced from a wife who loved him, is unwelcome in his implacably rationalist family. Incapable of loving, of really feeling alive, he is equally incapable of understanding why. Everything earlier than a moment in the family potting shed when he was 14 is blotted out of his mind, has been carefully blacked out of his family's, and offers not a chink of light to his psychoanalyst. The journey back-Greene ingeniously...
...presents them, however, not as Romantic individualists, but as two pairs--each pair being, like the two sides of a coin, opposites but mutually inseparable (it corresponds to the dualistic concept of inyo that permeates so much of Oriental thinking). In one case: teacher and pupil, guardian and ward, rationalist and emotionalist, etc.; in the other: capitalist and laborer, upper class and lower class, exploiter and exploited, etc. Superb as was Bert Lahr's performance individually last year, the requisite mutual rapport between Gogo and Didi was lacking; and it is this complementary interrelationship that Messrs. Hyman and Moreland...
Bertrand Russell, Britain's most astute rationalist, once wrote an essay called "The Harm that Good Men Do." In this book, that is also the theme of Roman Catholic Convert Greene. He saw the French debacle in Indo-China as correspondent for LIFE and the London Sunday Times. Out of Saigon, he wrote of the doomed Vietnamese, the touchy, defeatist French and their absurd allies like the Caodist "Pope," who had female cardinals and canonized Victor Hugo. Most significantly, he wrote in his diary: "Is there any solution here the West can offer? But the bar tonight was loud...
...true profundity of Communist thought" and finishes by making a severe attack on modern rationalism. He believes that Communism can be rejected only on emotional grounds and not rational ones, since the "Communist state is only the abstract social expression of the actual or potential situation inside each rationalist...
...read their souls. Why did Becket choose martyrdom? In Duggan's view, Becket was goaded to death by a kind of perverse romanticism: as a Norman knight ringed by his enemies, he died to show the English that it was "the Norman custom to stand fast." This mutedly rationalist ending of an otherwise excellent book will fail to satisfy many readers. It shows, once again, what a superb and poetically accurate work is T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, with its far nobler picture of a man who had put aside ambition-even spiritual ambition...