The Aristos

  172.116: nostalgie de la vierge. Nostalgia for the girl. Nabokov’s Lolita was symptomatic of a general twentieth century tendency, and one that is reciprocated by a nostalgia for the father in girls. Though physical virginity has lost its attraction for men, the chief drive in these girl-father relationships seems to be the mutual attraction of inexperience and experience; and this is reinforced by the typical consumer-society belief that the latest model is the best. The consumer’s pleasure is what counts; unfortunately in this case the discarded model is another human being.

  176.124: persona. The literal meaning is ‘mask’, as used by actors in the Greek and Roman theatre.

  181.142: Adler. Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the Austrian psychologist, believed that Freud overemphasized the sexual motives of human behaviour. Adler considered much more attention should be paid to the individual’s striving for superiority and power over others.

  Karen Homey. A German woman psychologist (1885-1952) who was greatly influenced both by Adler and by her experience of the United States, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. She placed stress on the need for security as a fundamental psychological drive, and believed that much neurosis was caused by environment rather than by disturbance in childhood.

  184.3: noösphere. A term coined by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit philosopher and anthropologist who died in 1955. In the noosphere there is no time – but only the placeless and ageless thoughts and creations of the human spirit in art and science, which encircle our present lives as the atmosphere encircles the earth.

  196.41: aleatory. The term (from the Latin alea, a dice-game) used to describe all those modern creative techniques that rely on hazard.

  198.52: lycanthropism. Literally, the desire to be a werewolf, but used of those forms of schizophrenic madness in which the patient has phases in which he imagines himself to be some beast and exhibits depraved appetites – the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality.

  204.72: onomatopoeia. The formation of words that sound like what they describe – hiss, bang, murmur, etc.

  209.88: Mallarmé. Stephane Mallarmé (1842-98), the greatest poet of the Symbolist school, whose most famous work is L’Après-midi d’un Faune, on which Debussy based his piece. The Symbolists erected metonymy, the literary device of suggesting instead of directly stating what one means, as the chief mode of poetic expression. One of Mallarmé’s best-known sonnets begins: Is the fresh, vivacious and beautiful today going to break with a drunken blow of the wing that stern forgotten lake which the transparent glacier of flights that have not flown haunts beneath the frost? These lines are generally taken to refer to the agonizing difficulty Mallarmé sometimes had in composing his poems; but other meanings are possible. It is this deliberate ambiguity of meaning that has dominated all modern art since Mallarmé.

  Notes

  1

  aristos is taken from the ancient Greek. It is singular and means roughly ‘the best for a given situation’. It is stressed on the first syllable.

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  2

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