Word: ageing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
...Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties of high craftsmanship but the appropriateness of public funding--talk about power!--for works that large segments of that public, not all of them ignoramuses, deplore. Strolling the latest Venice...
Peeping warily into the new century, the cultural traditionalist (anyone over the age of 40) feels like saying, with Estragon in Waiting for Godot, "I can't go on like this." He forgets the brave and cheeky response Samuel Beckett, last of the classic modernists, gave to Vladimir: "That's what you think...
...chroniclers lauded his ability to "appraise the true significance of events" and make good "the fickle promises of fortune." They also remarked that he was "too relentless to care though all might hate him." William the Conqueror was a man--or, more important, a monarch--for a new age...
...retreat was temporary. The strapping redhead won his first battle at age 13. At 20 he defeated the usurpers. He fought successfully for and against the French King. He made a dynastic marriage, over papal objections, to the daughter of the powerful Count of Flanders. (William was 5 ft. 10 in. tall, his Matilda barely 4 ft. They had at least nine children.) By 1065 he was absolute lord of a consolidated Normandy. Then he looked northward...