Word: vertigo
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...Jorge Luis Borges, has been blind. Yet Borges' latest book of poems and parables shows that blindness has not blurred his poetic vision. In his parable of blind Homer, Borges describes himself as well: "He descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and up from the vertigo he succeeded in bringing forth a forgotten recollection that shone like a coin under the rain...
Bourguignon uses his camera to show us the scene in the hazy distortions of Pierre's vision. We experience his vertigo at a rippling pond, the too-high trees, the electric cars careening in an amusement park. Finally, we appreciate the imbalance of his mental state, but have lost the ability or desire to empathize with him. In a quiet, attractive, inexplicable sense he is crazy, sometimes inscrutably moody or violent; we cannot understand him. Yet he is all the world to both Madeleine and Cybele, and so the film is about them; their profound love for Pierre...
Pierre finds in Cybele a shaman and guru, and obediently follows her in a ritual play-therapy. Through her he will be freed from his amnesia and vertigo--"You will be my healer," he pleads early in their friendship. And, indeed, the dizziness disappears when at last he climbs a steeple to steal the weather-cock she has so long cherished...
...Gian Carlo Menotti, death is the moment of the enlightenment that makes life worthwhile. In Labyrinth, his last television opera, he dwelt on the idea to the point of moral vertigo. If life is a grand hotel, he seemed to be saying, then death is its night clerk. Those who want keys to their rooms must die to get them...
...wrote, because here life took on a more "smiling aspect." Biographer Edwin H. Cady presents evidence that the peculiar blindness of this reticent realist may have had a base in neurosis. The son of an Ohio printer, Howells was a weedy adolescent plagued by acute vertigo, hypochondria and a tendency to uncontrollable homesickness. His literary ability won him a job as city editor of a Cincinnati newspaper, but his first view of police court sent him home with the shudders. His neuroticism, although he learned to control it. left him with a lifelong terror of going beyond the "cleanly respectabilities...