Word: schirmbeck
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...THINE EYE OFFEND THEE (405 pp.) - Heinrich Schirmbeck - Simon & Schuster...
...Author Schirmbeck is a metaphysical novelist of considerable imagination and hubris who is desperately concerned with recementing the duality whose halves are customarily called reason and feeling, truth and grace, science and morality, or mathematics and poetry. A character in his novel-itself a disturbing duality, part murky hokum, part stark reality-expresses the wish to be the first poet of modern physics. Clearly he speaks for the author, a German science-journalist, and if Schirmbeck's book falls short of poetry and has some irritating left-wing political overtones, it is nevertheless an extraordinary novel of ideas...
...also? Can the physicists with their nucleonics and the cyberneticists with their computers wash themselves of culpability for the blinding light they have created? Is all new knowledge good? And if it is not, should scientists be controlled - by the state, for the state's ends? So Schirmbeck's characters inquire, talking essays to each other the way Aldous Huxley's people used to, and enthusiastically fogging the main issues with wildly sprayed brilliance on such matters as the esthetics of the ballet and the narrator's Oedipus entanglements...
...Europe Schirmbeck draws is fantastic, but only slightly more so than the real one. Germany is called Armagnac; Paris, Sybaris; everyone is spied on by an agency of the Western alliance called the Office of Strategic Information. Science is a weapon for soldiers, not a tool of philosophers. A power-warped rationalist named Elliot, who strongly resembles the villainous Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, speculates with pleasure on "the electronics of the soul"-soon, he promises, cyberneticists will know enough about mechanical brains to control human nerve cells with ease. "We are moving," someone says, "toward...