Word: thinker
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Marriage Album. Everything had the power to stir Picasso's imagination. He kept owls, pigeons, even a smelly he-goat around the house. He loved to blow loudly on an old French army bugle. He was superstitious to a degree unsuspected in such an undisciplined liberal thinker. A hat thrown on a bed (meaning that someone in the house was going to die before the year was over) could throw him into a tantrum. Dancing was total depravity to Picasso, who was otherwise unbothered by convention...
Fowles's acknowledged mentor is the 6th century B.C. Greek thinker Heraclitus, whose extant work consists only of brief fragments declaring cryptically that the universe is in flux, that life is a ceaseless struggle of opposites: fire and water, earth and spirit, love and hate. Fowles shares Heraclitus' reverence for life, his clear-eyed contemplation of the tragic, his love of paradox; and he is even more eloquent...
Like many another existentialist-type thinker, Fowles combines a cosmic pessimism with a reformer's drive to improve the world. Less interesting and less moving on such topics as cybernetics and birth control, he is nonetheless eminently sensible, and his strictures aimed against all dogmatic camps are shrewd: "A Christian says, 'If all were good, all would be happy.' A socialist says, 'If all were happy, all would be good.' A mystic says, 'If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter.' A humanist says, 'Happiness and goodness need more...
...WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Always a brilliant but negative thinker, Sartre has focused his critical power on himself as a child and dislikes what he sees. From this graceful, simple memoir, the cast of a powerful, angry mind that was to reject all symbols of tradition, from God to the Nobel Prize, can easily be traced...
...Physicists opens with a corpse stretched out on the stage, and the play promptly follows suit. The setting is a sanitarium for the insane, but the chief delusion of the evening is harbored by Swiss Playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt (The Visit), who plainly believes that he is a deep thinker. He dispenses fat, fuzzy thoughts on atomic scientists, moral responsibility, and the apocalyptic menace of the bomb as if he were imparting profound revelations rather than portentous bromides...