Word: rousseau
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...clear, however, that our supposed childishness is anything more than our response to a debased liberalism. Dean Ford finds the source of our "destructiveness" in the tradition of Voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame." I think he would be more accurate to recognize our debt to Rousseau's refusal to accept the false culture Voltaire proposed--through D'Alembert--to introduce into Geneva. For I detect in Dean Ford's article an unwillingness to consider seriously the possibility that much of bourgeois culture and much of the culture of the university is fraudulent. I find such a stance as blind...
...never joined the Communist Party, and when, during World War II, he offered his services to the Greek partisans, they rejected him as unreliable. Kazantzakis derided the party's attempt to reduce life to a set of abstractions. Communists, he wrote, reminded him of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who took a prostitute to his room in Venice. "When they lay down in bed and she got undressed," Kazantzakis writes, "poor Jean Jacques began begging her to take the straight and narrow path...
Provocative Perfume. The most lucidly honest autobiography since Rousseau's Confessions, The Seven Storey Mountain found a surprisingly receptive audience in the uneasy, searching postwar world. The book was a frank, self-effacing narrative of Merton's peripatetic youth: his dizzying year at Cambridge, his first grapplings with the craft of poetry, his mildly wicked undergraduate years at Columbia (including a one-meeting membership in the Young Communist League), his ultimate discovery of a faith and a vocation. It was a book suffused with spiritual zeal, and was perhaps the last great flowering of Catholic romanticism. Its perfume...
Finally, so little is impressive about modernity; amidst a sort of garish decline, the loss of value in life itself, and a corresponding neglect of language, poets like Charles Simic are thinking about what it would be like to take what people think Rousseau means seriously...
...hundred years ago, Jean Jacques Rousseau described peace parleys as "a species of general diets where one deliberates in common as to whether the table will be round or square, whether the chamber will have more or fewer doors, whether such and such a plenipotentiary will have his face or his back turned toward the window, whether such and such another will take two steps more or less while making a visit, and upon a thousand other questions of equal importance, uselessly debated for the past three centuries." Things have scarcely changed since...