Word: utopia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...moreover, immovably eccentric: a gray whisper of a man who lived for 54 years with his crippled brother in a house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y.- an exile more singular than any expatriation to Tahiti. Cornell loved the idea of Europe but never went there. The house was crammed with cartons, dossiers, packets of old photos, clippings, hoarded books, gewgaws and boxes; these constituted the world in which he traveled. His only public gestures were occasional exhibitions and cover designs for the ballet magazine Dance Index. Self-promotion was unthinkable to him. Cornell always seemed an emissary from...
Cornell's imagination was allusive, delicate and, in a liberated way, reserved. He had no interest in the erotic, scatological and sadistic images that were basic to French surrealism: the Comte de Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade did not preside over the house on Utopia Parkway. French surrealism was to a great extent defined by its indispensable enemy, French bourgeois Catholicism. Surrealism's whole mode of attack-the manifestoes, shock treatment and sacerdotal gesticulation-was based on an idea of the artist as public figure, the Anti-Priest, to which Cornell did not subscribe...
...intelligent enough to ponder such elemental issues without becoming elementary. She knows that her present state is predicated on the past; her own archaeological work has helped swell the warehouse of history. Yet Frances also recognizes that she and her colleagues are digging for lies: "We seek a Utopia in the past, a possible if not ideal society. We seek golden worlds from which we are banished, they recede infinitely, for there never was a golden world, there was never anything but toil and subsistence, cruelty and dullness...
...find a new program, to build national community, and to develop some common moral language is not guaranteed to produce good people. Such activities will not eliminate evil, bring about personal moral regeneration, save souls, gladden all sad hearts or bring in the kingdom of God, Utopia or even certainty. They will not remove all citizens' nostalgia for the simpler life, for the less visible and less jarring pluralism of colonial times. But they could contribute to the process by which, after two centuries, Americans could again seek to be "a reformed and happy people." For the moment, though...
...families have signed up; the goal is 300 members, including doctors, dentists, and forestry and agrarian experts to ensure a self-sustaining community. When the end comes, the promoters say gleefully, they will dynamite all approach roads to keep the rest of the ruined world out of this Utopia...