High school & college brought him word of what the stars really were, how senselessly large & distant & numerous, but such intellectual shocks were cushioned by the distractions of coeducation--female bodies... Decades went by in which his acquaintance with the stars failed to advance.
Marxism had been imposed upon the country "just as one drops a cage over a stunned bird," leaving the intellectual climate shocked and stunted, he wrote in 1956.
In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad.
Merton's conversion, in 1939, was the result of an intellectual journey which, to the shock of his friends, led him, two years later, to a life of contemplation and extreme austerity, in the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.
Historian Paul Fussell wrote about the war creating an "immense intellectual, cultural and social shock".
It's not, of course, that monstrosity automatically goes with intellectual brilliance, but the shock forces him to think again about what he should be looking for.
During the relative liberalisation of the post-Mao economic reforms, the disaffected Lili shocks her intellectual parents ("I love to upset those old Confucians") by cohabiting with Roy, an American journalist.
A group of renowned French philosophes -- Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire, for example -- receive all the credit for advancing a shocking new intellectual agenda that eroded a traditional moral order and eventually brought down the ancien regime.
But a letter from 1880 indicates that Edith believed herself to have found with Bahlmann the kind of friendship "which makes itself felt less by personal intercourse, than by those shocks of intellectual sympathy which seem to bridge over silence and space and make two minds as one".
