Word: abyss
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...original version of The Postman Always Rings Twice inspired Camus to write The Stranger. It's pretty difficult to imagine old Albert sitting in a movie theater, watching a movie that oozes of sex and murder, and coming up with the notion of nobility in the face of the Abyss. It's easier to picture Mickey Spillane sitting there with a bunch of his corporate-thugs and coming up with the idea for a whole series of pulp thrillers. Maybe there's some meaning lurking in the fact that we were gushing over Sinatra while the French were building...
...jump, she shouldn't jump, she ought to jump: she couldn't make up her mind. Steve. Angela and Frank were all encouraging her, first with words, then with hands on her shoulder, finally with shoves. She started to kick and scream anything to avoid being thrown into the abyss...
When you get to that sort of error, you are nearing a psychological abyss. It was Freud who first removed the element of accident from language with his explanation of "slips," but lately others have extended his theories. Psychiatrist Richard Yazmajian, for example, suggests that there are some incorrect words that exist in associative chains with the correct ones for which they are substituted, implying a kind of "dream pair" of elements in the speaker's psyche. The nun who poured tea for the Irish bishop and asked, "How many lords, my lump?" might therefore have been asking...
...especially London in the blitz. Bowen courageously, stubbornly stayed in her house there, when many friends had taken to the countryside to escape the German bombardment. While the city shook and plaster fell, Bowen collected images and wove them into stories that hauntingly balanced civilization above an abyss. In the Square notes how the bombs were returning London to nature: "The sun, now too low to enter [the square] normally, was able to enter brilliantly at a point where three of the houses had been bombed away; two or three of the may trees, dark with summer, caught on their...
Thrusting out of the sea bottom, the hand on the sinewy forearm was reaching beyond the abyss of time. Two swimmers spotted it while diving off a beach at Riace Marina, a resort in Reggio Calabria on the toe of the Italian boot. Their find was not far offshore (about 325 yds.) or in very deep water (less than 26 ft.). But it turned out to be astonishingly distant in age: about 24 centuries, in fact. Experts quickly uncovered a 990-lb. life-size bronze figure of a warrior. Near by they found a second bronze of similar heft...