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Literary notes about macabre (AI summary)

In literature, the word "macabre" is often employed to evoke a stark imagery of decay, death, and ominous inevitability, yet its usage can also serve to underscore contrasts between dark and light aspects of existence. For example, in Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda invokes the phrase "danse macabre" to imply the traditional associations of chaos, pestilence, and death, but then deliberately contrasts these grim notions with a vision of peace, prosperity, and expanding knowledge [1]. This interplay highlights the author's ability to use the macabre not simply as a descriptor of horror but as a rhetorical device that accentuates what the world is not—thereby enriching the narrative with layers of symbolic meaning.
  1. Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the danse macabre , but one broad land of peace, of prosperity, and of widening knowledge.
    — from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

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