Word: richwick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1962-1962
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Richwick-priggish, prudish bachelor that he is-perseveres. He lets it be known that she is the mentally retarded daughter of a sister in Scotland and engages a nurse for her who has specialized in backward children. Richwick, who narrates the story, and Mrs. Burnley, the nanny, settle down to their labor of love: turning a vixen into a girl...
Sylva slowly, painfully struggles away from the animal world. She escapes to the forest, only to discover that it rejects her new body. She escapes again to shack up with a feeble-minded woodcutter and returns to embarrass the prissy Richwick with her uninhibited advances (in a satirical switch, Vercors has Richwick study Freud in order to give Sylva some inhibitions). But the major gap that separates human from animal mentality is man's conscious awareness of his own existence. Eventually, Sylva makes the leap, and from the frightening moment when she discovers herself as an individual entity separate...
...plays with dies, she discovers death. With the knowledge of death comes laughter. "It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace," reflects Narrator Richwick. "During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal...
Sugar-Coated Pill. Vercors counterpoises Sylva's struggle upward with the sordid decline of Richwick's sometime girl friend into a drug-addicted, sexually perverted mindlessness. After a dash of degradation with her in London, Richwick escapes to come back home as a love-smitten Pygmalion to his Galatea-who turns out to be pregnant...
...late French Jesuit philosopher-anthropologist, Father Teilhard de Chardin (TIME, Feb. 10). "But the striving and aspiring must be social to be fruitful." Vercors insists. "The yogi working by himself for himself is a dead end. In my book, the forms and standards of society are represented by Richwick-that's why he may seem something of a prig. But it is these very forms, personified in Richwick, that give Sylva a direction and pattern for her development. And in dedicating himself to her, he too is elevated...