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Characters: 6 male, 3 female Interior Robert Montgomery calls his Subject To Fits not an adaptation but "a response to Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, smacking of The Idiot, dreaming of The Idiot, but mostly taking off from where The Idiot drove it." Prince Myshkin, a pure soul just released from an epilepsy clinic, is thrown into the mad whirl of St. Petersburg society. His child-like honesty steals the hearts of two competing women: the aristocratic Aglaya, and the decadent Natasha; and wins the dark friendships of the men: a murderer, a consumptive, an alcoholic, a hopeless mediocrity and a toady. But his innocence flails against their fitful intensity. He suffers two seizures of ecstatic vision...
"Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself" is a satirical work from the early years of the American Republic. It was written in the form as an autobiography and acquired wide acclaim after publishing. The story tells about a young man wishing to find a buried treasure. Instead, he finds the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. This results in a picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness. But every new form disappoints him. Lee comes to the conclusion that everything in America, even virtue and vice, are interchangeable; everything is an object and has its price.
Yes, there's a serial killer in this story, along with a Hollywood producer, an adventure in Europe, and my introduction into a life of crime by the daughter of a prominent actor. It's a true story too. I present it to you as journal entries, almost exactly as I wrote them more than 40 years ago. I have added a little clarification as to who's who and cleaned up a few spelling and punctuation errors. Also, I've changed some names out of respect for the privacy of those people. Otherwise, this is a truthful account of the adventures and misadventures I experienced after my divorce in 1976. Although I was 28 at the time this occurred, I was always years behind my peers in terms of landmark lif...
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It will scarcely be supposed that, with the passion of covetousness gnawing at my heart, I had space or convenience for any other feeling. But Abram Skinner had loved his children; and to this passion I was introduced, as well as to the other. At first I was surprised that I should bestow the least regard upon them, seeing that they were no children of mine. I endeavoured to shake off the feeling of attachment, as an absurdity, but could not; in spite of myself, I found my spirit yearning towards them; and by-and-by, having lost my identity entirely, I could scarcely, even when I made the effort, recall the consciousness that I was not their parent in reality. Indeed, the transformation that had now occurred to my spirit was more thorough than it had been in either previous instance; I could scarce convince myself I had not been born the being I represented; my past existence began to appear to my reflections only as some idle dream, that the fever of sickness had brought upon my mind; and I forgot that I was, or had been, Sheppard Lee.
In the year of Grace fifteen hundred and twenty, upon a day in the month of May thereof, the sun rose over the islands of the new deep, and the mountains that divided it from an ocean yet unknown, and looked upon the havoc, which, in the name of God, a Christian people were working upon the loveliest of his regions. He had seen, in the revolution of a day, the strange transformations which a few years had brought upon all the climes and races of his love. The standard of Portugal waved from the minarets of the east; a Portuguese admiral swept the Persian Gulf, and bombarded the walls of Ormuz; a Portuguese viceroy held his court on the shores of the Indian ocean; the princes of the eastern c...
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Of the major world religions, only three, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have diffused widely. They were introduced across numerous socio-cultural boundaries and were received as new religions to their converts. However, these diffusing religions have had varying degrees of success from wholesale reception to wholesale rejection. This book presents the perspective that a major factor in the variations in the diffusions of these religions, and in the religions themselves, is found in the nature of the inter-group relationships between receiving groups and both sending groups and surrounding groups. A crucial perception of the receivers is the perceived contribution the new religion will make to the enhancement of important aspects of group identities and of the strength of the group. This book takes into account diffusion, an old and persistent concept in the social sciences which has been rarely applied in sociology to religions or even ideologies.