Word: agee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...said there are no second acts in American life? The desire to make radical changes in what is now called one's "lifestyle" is a fundamental of American character. "A man builds a house for his old age and sells it before the roof is finished," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote some 140 years before Charles Reich sublet his leaky Consciousness III to follow the sunset to California. Reich's evolutionary rebellion is, in fact, a mobile-home version of Consciousness III-that pot-scented notion that mankind can somehow escape civilization and its discontents. Gnomic and unpolitical...
Chosen Route. In this account of his own autumnal days on Martha's Vineyard, Hough, with great skill and charm, approaches the pangs and pleasures of aging in ways that very much recall Walden's formula: keep track of housekeeping details and the transcendental homilies will take care of themselves. At home Hough's day still begins as it has for years, with a predawn walk to Edgartown's harbor light. Graham goes along but does not always agree to the route his master has chosen, and, like many Americans, has "a weakness for excavation...
...that has been lost as I looked on," he remarks. "In New England there is hardly an alternative other than a furtive sense of having been conspired against, which, difficult of concealment, leads one's neighbors to say one has 'turned queer.' " Then he warns: "In age a man may become a stranger in his native land." He wonders, too, if the intense preoccupation with the future so often institutionally urged upon the aged is realistic. "The past is secure, the present only reasonably so, and the future, even looking ahead to Thanksgiving or Christmas...
...state legislature. During the summer primary campaign, he turned 30, but he was still acutely aware that if elected, he would be perhaps the youngest member of the House. Youth is often an advantage, but in practical terms, the only people who successfully run for Congress at age 29 are either personally wealthy, blessed with a famous name, or are war heroes. Markey was none of these, and most of the politicians in his home town told him that he should wait, rather than run at such an early age...
...situation didn't look good for Markey. He was from Macdonald's home town of Medford, and many of the political elders there had told him he would some day follow Macdonald's footsteps to the Capitol. But not yet, not at age 29. Markey himself felt the superficial differences keenly. Macdonald went to Harvard and Harvard Law School, was captain of the Harvard football team, was the Winthrop House roommate of former president John F. Kennedy '40 and, like Kennedy, was a World War'II Navy veteran. Markey, by contrast, is a milkman's son who went to Boston...