Volume 8, Number 8 · May 4, 1967
Rude Torso
By J.M. Cameron
Love's Body
by Norman O. Brown
Random House, 276 pp., $5.95
'The world is so full of a number of things/I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.' That human life is not paradisal we all at times find faintly puzzling and scratch about for some hypothesis to explain the wretchedness of man. 'The wretchedness of a king who has lost his crown,' says Pascal. The hypothesis of Original Sin, the idea of a primal fault, a going wrong without which all would now be well, this has always had a plain appeal. Again, we may feel that some decisive event, or set of events, within our power to bring about, will establish the conditions for paradise. Time may be made to run forward rather than back to fetch the age of gold. Such has been the appeal of a thousand chiliastic sects, a thousand utopian communities. After the American and French revolutions Tom Paine wrote: 'Monarchical sovereignty, the enemy of mankind, and the source of misery, is abolished; and the sovereignty itself is restored to its natural and original place, the nation. Were this the case throughout Europe, the cause of wars would be taken away.'
Review, 2603 words
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