Word: rigor
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Does debate weaken democracy? On the contrary, argues Author Labin, the rigor of the dogmatic one-opinion police state leads only to rigor mortis: "To believe that music must bring forth Leninistic harmonies, that physics must be de-Semiticized . . . non-Aryans sterilized, the kulaks exterminated: to believe all this, even unanimously-above all unanimously-must lead a people to catastrophe . . . Hamlet is frequently cited as an example of the tragedy caused by thought not followed by action, but, as Bertrand Russell judiciously observes, the totalitarians ought rather to meditate upon the fate of Othello, on the disasters provoked by action...
...modern Europe's greatest novelists, including Proust. Mann and Joyce, European culture is a dying patient at whose bedside they have arrived too late. Societies in rigor mortis also fascinated Robert Musil, a little-known Austrian ex-army officer, who began dissecting the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1922 in a novel called The Man Without Qualities, and kept at it until he died 20 years and 2,000 pages later. U.S. publishers of the book are releasing one-fifth of it at a time (the first installment appeared last year-TIME, June 8, 1953). It is a fascinating book...
...million comic books that readers buy each month are known as "horror comics," bearing such titles as Tormented, The Thing, Web of Evil. Typical plot: a gravedigger falls in love with a beautiful girl, kills her in a fit of passion and then makes love to the corpse. When rigor mortis sets in, the gravedigger is strangled in the dead girl's arms. Such gory plots and pictures, which brought on a congressional investigation of horror comics (TIME, May 3), have stirred up a nationwide campaign against the books...
...Luftwaffe general, Smiling Al Kesselring lacked the dash of a Rommel, the Prussian rigor of Von Rundstedt, or the inventive flair of a Guderian; yet he fashioned a career almost as brilliant as theirs. At war's start he commanded a single air fleet in Poland, later bossed all German air forces in North Africa, took charge of the Mediterranean theater in the slow German retreat up the boot of Italy, and ended the war as commander in chief in the West. As told in Kesselring's foot-slogging style, much of this story borders...
...critics got the dithers. "We are in the presence of a boy," wrote one, "possessing a creative confidence, a mental perfection and a rigor of expression belonging to the most accomplished and the most experienced, an artist who has given up all the illusions of youth." The esthetes rolled their eyes. "He dominated us all," says Jean Cocteau, "by his wisdom, his calm, and the clairvoyance of his myopic eyes turned inward...