Word: spirited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...urge for sancity. He analyzes his successive commitments to the contradictory philosophies of Christ, Buddha, Lenin, and Nietzsche. And, in some of his most sonorous passages, Kazantzakis chronicles a battle of the soul that has echoes through works from the Bible to Herzog--the duel between flesh and spirit. Characteristically, Kazantzakis writes of this battle in the most expansive terms...
Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation...God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear...
...flashed as though armed with swords." Kazantzakis lived a life of cosmic oppositions, of pressing and encompassing dualities. One is hardly surprised to find Kazantzakis posing problems like the battle of spirit and flesh in this way--but he extends the approach to many other battles. He explains that he views his life as a battle for spiritual ascent--and the reader of Report to Greco becomes overwhelmed by the extent to which he lived and wrote about life in these terms...
...Gaulle's death would be a tragedy," Francon believes, because "he is a kind of savior." Francon thinks that De Gaulle's claim to "represent the spirit of France is fundamentally true...
...nose was broken in one barracks fight; in another, five soldiers painted him white. "You ain't never gonna be this white, no matter how hard you try," one of them told him. But he emerged from the service with a spirit that was unbroken, determined to scrub out his color as a bar to reaching the top in show business. He began breaking down the taboos that have long circumscribed Negroes, including the rule that colored entertainers must never imitate white celebrities. "You just stick with Satchmo and Step'n Fetchit," begged his manager. But Davis listened...