Word: sacramentalism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...both "afflictive and curative." He suggests four kinds of afflictive penances: 1) voluntary mortification, such as early rising, giving up smoking; 2) cheerful acceptance of suffering, such as hunger, humiliation, a bad cold; 3) doing a good deed; 4) "a somewhat burdensome prayer or a visit to the Holy Sacrament on one's knees." Father Lamera would adapt "curative" penances to individual weaknesses: e.g., for the proud. "You will not talk about yourself...
Half the ministers doubt that the value of the sacrament of Communion depends entirely upon the attitude of the participant, while less than 20% of the laymen show any uncertainty...
...similarity to Christian sacrament won't carry you to the core of Oedipus, either, for Sophocles' drama is above all else a pagan rite of purification. It is a religious outlook worthy of general reconsideration, and the present film will show you not only what the Athenians saw on stage twenty-five centuries ago but what they saw in the world and the cosmos as well. The masks of the actors bear a bizarre and wholly appropriate resemblance to the grotesque faces of the magnified reptiles and insects seen in the Brattle's introductory short subject. Tanya Moiseiwitsch has provided...
...pursuit of what B.B. calls "IT". "IT", he explains, "comes to mean taking life ritually as something holy, of mystical import and in one's thought ideatedly--if not in realizable actuality as a sacred performance. From childhood I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament. With the years it merged into the wish that it could be lived with the significance of a work...