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: Mallarme. Stephane Mallarme (1842-98), the greatest poet of the Symbolist school, whose most famous work is L’Apres-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 Mallarme’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 Mallarme 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 Mallarme.
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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.
An asterisk indicates a note at the end of this book.
