Word: tormenting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...modern world as never before. They should relax, says Richard Hofstadter, a practicing intellectual himself and a Columbia University historian (The American Political Tradition, The Age of Reform). "Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: 'Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!' " Anti-intellectualism, argues Hofstadter, is part and parcel of any popular democracy...
Winter Light. Sweden's cinematic poltergeist, Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, once more haunts the dark and chilly corridors where Man loses God, and once more the soul in torment seems to be his own. Bergman is the son of an austere Evangelical Lutheran parson who molded the boy with icy constraint and puritanical tyranny, and of a mother who was remote from both son and husband. To Bergman his parents were "sealed in iron caskets." This boyhood gave him the permeating motifs for his work: "God and the Devil, Life and Death, the drama of the couple...
...these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment...
Living in terror to die in torment-Man's fate and theirs-and the island rocks and immense ocean beyond, and Lobos Darkening above the bay: they...
...Czar's torment is terrible-but is it madness or fatal grief? He lives out his last days in the hollow splendor of his Russian palace, haunted by the child king he has murdered, as frightened of his own evil as of the false pretender who is coming through the winter forests to kill him. At last he dies, and in dying Boris Godunov demands an all-but-impossible mystic triumph of the bassos who sing his tragic role: his final prayer must be torn from a soul already lost, from lips already dead. Yet in the last...