Word: slough
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bresson, his priest, and his parishioners are trapped in an embarrassing slough of original sin. And there seems little hope for any of them. The countess dies with a renewed faith, but the priest confesses that "I have imparted a peace I do not myself possess." The central figure of the priest is disturbingly ambiguous: lonely and unable to communicate, he becomes increasingly certain of his own ineptness. But one feels that successful communication with these parishioners would only insure eventual damnation; the failure of his mission cannot, ultimately, be called a tragic one. The curate's confusion leads...
...startling residue of thunderous denial, the amalgam of Huck and his raft separated by Thomas Moore's "Lolly Rookh" from the black pristine love found in the shoals of the frozen Charles!" Diana Trilling writes, "...disconcerted by the misconception of the tragic hero (ine?) and...foundering in the slough of my husband's anguish, I found it lovely." Norman Mailer's criticism is more direct: "...in Cambridge it always stinks--like sweat...
...have taken Nick through school and university, and have looked fixedly at English high life and business. The current episode concerns that curious interbellum miscegenation between Society and the Arts dealt with so brilliantly in the satiric masterpiece of Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God. Its period is that Slough of Despond known as the Late Thirties, and nowhere else has the moral despair of that time been better described. It calls to mind the philosophical conundrum: "If a man tossing a coin to a one-eyed beggar blinds his good eye, is his action praiseworthy...