Word: sin
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...Sin of Omission. The search for work is intense. So many job seekers want to enlist in the armed forces that recruiters have raised admission standards, and the Air Force even turns down some men with master's degrees. All over the U.S. employers find they can fill jobs that pay only $2 or $2.25 an hour for gas station attendants, security guards, dishwashers. Those openings are often grabbed up by people who used to earn twice or three times as much. To get any job at all, some people are downplaying their talents and training, hoping to avoid...
...naturally hip jargon, and it has forbidden the least hint of sexual innuendo or topicality in the show's humor. As usual, the network is underrating the sophistication of today's kids, if not their parents' capacity for taking moral offense at everything but the worst sin of all-blandness...
These views were futuristically dramatized in both Burgess's novel and Stanley Kubrick's version of The Clockwork Orange. In Enderby's End, Burgess pits the poor poet against the whole city of New York, an area where sin, original or otherwise, is surely not in short supply. Enderby reaches the New World in ways faintly congruent with Burgess's recent career. His name appears among the screenplay credits of a shocking film, and thus notorious, he is offered a teaching post at one of Manhattan's melting-pot universities (in 1972 Burgess lectured...
...Original Sin. Enderby's chief drawback was not digestion but want of genius. Burgess can convincingly describe ways in which images might come to a kind of colloidal suspension in the expectant poet's mind. But when he had to cut the cackle and produce the egg, both reader and author were left in the embarrassing presence of Enderby's mediocre verses. Yet Burgess, a man of wit and genius, has been fond enough of this queasy minor poet to devote one, two and now three volumes to him. Why? Because with all his faults, Enderby...
Burgess, in fact, sees the key moral conflict of our age as an extension of the argument that took place between the heretic Pelagius and St. Augustine some 1,600 years ago. Man, preached Pelagius, is untainted by original sin and is thus perfectible through his own efforts. The cynical saint disagreed and ran Pelagius out of Rome. But this humane heretic's views now dominate society, Burgess suggests, through the delusive notion that men are essentially creatures of their environment whose actions must be controlled by benign behaviorists. Disaster, says Burgess. No original sin, no evil. No evil...