Word: zorn
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MARS by Fritz Zorn Afterword by Adolf Muschg Translated by Robert and Rita Kimber Knopf; 241 pages...
...terrible question of cancer patients is "Why me?" In Mars, the terminally ill Fritz Zorn cries a harrowing answer: "My parents' neuroses were responsible for producing my neurosis; my neurosis was responsible for producing my lifelong despair; my despair is responsible for my being ill with cancer; and my cancer will be the cause of my death...
...character type, "far from being confined to the back yard of folk superstition, passes for the most advanced medical thinking." Sontag attempts to refute such theories, ascribing them to fear and ignorance in the face of a disease that eludes any comprehensive cure. Yet, cogent arguments seem pale beside Zorn's anguished testimony. Testimony that drowns out dissent through its own vehemence...
...Zorn's life as a university student is equally pathetic. He takes no satisfaction in brilliant academic performances. Imprisoned by his own neurosis, he never touches or approaches anyone. He has a fear of sexuality, a fear of rejection, a fear of love. "I was taught all the common Christian virtues," he recalls, "like abstinence, renunciation, docility, patience, and, most important of all, a clear denial of almost all aspects of life. In other words, I was taught not to enjoy life but to bear it without complaint, not to be sinful but to be frustrated ... That...
...painted by one of the lions of the medium, those astonishingly facile and brisk painters who plied their trade in the upper reaches of a society through which they moved on almost equal terms with their clients-Paul-César Helleu, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent, who became to the British Empire what Velásquez had been to the Habsburg court of Madrid or Sir Anthony van Dyck to Charles I: the official portraitist par excellence, the unrivaled chronicler of male power...