Word: tarden
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...suggests Tarden, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit. If Tarden is indeed a creature from some other writer's galaxy, that author is manifestly Dostoyevsky. For like his predecessor, Kosinski explores the classic antinomies of rationality-and of experience that defeats reason and mocks humanity...
...Tarden is a predatory double agent now on the run from his American employers, known only as The Service. He has stolen enough to permit a life of ease. But there is no such word as leisure in the Tarden lexicon. A compulsive wanderer, he prowls the dry surfaces of the globe, uprooting lives and unearthing scandal. Half voyeur, half behavioral experimenter, he sees himself as a psychosexual conquistador, forever searching for-what? Even Tarden cannot...
Pascal theorized that all the world's troubles originated from man's inability to sit still in a room. Tarden's life is an enactment of that aphorism. His encounters serve chiefly to erode his soul and corrupt those who enter his life. A girl who falls in love with him leaps from a roof and becomes paralyzed. His closest friend goes insane and attempts to decapitate him. A mistress who has misbehaved is turned over to three derelicts to be gang-raped. Yet Tarden is also capable of whimsical decencies. A political prisoner is released when...