Word: sinning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Most Fatal Sin." Suicide was not always frowned on; in eight instances in the Bible*suicide is not mentioned in condemnation, and the ancients in the Hellenic times tended to look upon the power to take one's own life as an inalienable privilege. But St. Thomas Aquinas summed up the reason for the Roman Catholic Church's severity toward suicide when he wrote: "[It] is the most fatal of sins, because it cannot be repented of." Protestantism was even harder on suicides than Catholicism...
...weird, whose lodge brothers Mailer tags "white Negroes" (although black Negroes also are members). Hipsters, writes Mailer admiringly, are "philosophical psychopaths," stronger, less intellectual and more vigorous sexually than Beatniks. The opposite of Hip, of course, is Square. Mailer it-provides a small glossary of opposites: crooks and sin are Hip, while cops and salvation are Square; likewise T-formation football and the New York Herald Tribune are Hip, but the single-wing formation and the New York Times are Square. Asking why, apparently, is also Square...
Other Men's Deaths. Author West is a Roman Catholic, but his book is intensely Christian beyond the limits of creed. Like Graham Greene and Francois Mauriac, West is concerned with sin and redemptive grace, but without their somewhat morbid preoccupation with evil. Rarely has the vocation of a priest or the problems of leading a Christian life been explored with such dramatic passion and compassion. One quality is completely absent-what Author West himself calls the "peppermint piety" of the stock religious bestseller...
...proving grounds, nights and Sundays he buries himself under three to four hours of homework. Any hour of day or night, dealers and customers phone him for counsel. In the middle of the night recently, a weeping woman phoned from Minneapolis, said that she was tired of living in sin. But the man refused to marry her until he got the Chevy that he had ordered for a honeymoon trip. Please, couldn't Mr. Cole do something...
...Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936-it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit...