Word: soule
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Johannesburg "The Golden City," but it doesn't live up to its name. It is a predominantly ugly metropolis. Although a few handsome towers dot the skyline, most of the buildings that line the streets are old, undistinguished and grime-encrusted. A guide termed Johannesburg "a city with no soul," and it's hard to argue with him. There are several theaters, and pleasant restaurants where a good dinner costs less than ten dollars abound; but other than that the city has little to offer. And it is one of the world's most dangerous cities. Visitors are instructed...
...unconscious. People once said that they were "in" psychoanalysis, meaning that they were committed to a long immersion. In a sense, they were writing their autobiographies. Now, people "go for" psychotherapy as they would go for a haircut, a walk in the park or Chinese food. The mind and soul are felt to be more casually accessible than they once were. In addition, the acquisition of self-awareness should not be too laborious, time-consuming or unpleasant...
Graham Greene's architect Querry had to trek to an African leprosarium to find a metaphor adequate to express his mood; nothing less would be sufficiently wasted, blighted, defunct. Querry was, Greene meant, A Burnt-Out Case, like the leper Deo Gratias, his soul far gone. He was a masterpiece of acedia, a skull full of ashes, a rhapsodist of his own desolation...
...tradition and brought up in darkest Devon by a pair of truly Dickensian aunts before escaping to boarding school ("You can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a good school"). He was homosexual, but neither Saki nor Langguth goes in for soul searching about the love that once dared not speak its name. Saki, in fact, never mentioned it. His sister merely refers to his habit of sharing digs with young men as "chumming." In the biographer's view, however, being a prey to lusts that could have landed...
...Throughout Saki's life, Celtic mysticism and foreboding, plus a raw strain of patriotism, kept trying to break through the veneer of satiric wit and comic, cultured urbanity that made him celebrated as man and writer. Langguth notes that he knew "the frustration of an adventurer's soul locked in the body of a clerk." Soon Munro left London again to become the Morning Post's correspondent in the Balkans, covering the bloody rivalry between Turks and Bulgars. He moved on to St. Petersburg, witnessing the march on the Winter Palace in 1905 and savage reprisal...