Word: altar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hildebrand was an infant when her Mennonite parents left Russia and joined Canada's new Mennonite colony in the Red River Valley. The empty west assured isolation and few distractions for the Godfearing. They had their churches as they wanted them, without organ, altar or ornamentation. Their preachers were unpaid, farmed for a living. They clung to their pacifism, dressed in the plain garb that allowed no ornamentation or jewelry...
Candles at the Altar. Arrigo Boito, excitable and fiercely mustachioed, was the son of an Italian painter of miniatures who abandoned his family soon after Ar-rigo's birth. His mother, a Polish countess, set him studying to become a musician. At 19, his cantata Le Sorelle d'Italia won him a traveling scholarship. On his way home from Paris he traveled through Poland and Germany and picked up some heretical ideas that soon got him in hot water at home. Sample: he wrote a poem calling for a composer who could restore the glory of Italian music...
...Guess I'm kind of morbid," he asserts. "I'd sorta figured on setting up a little altar in the corner of the room and worshipping the darned thing. Just for a gag you know...
...ever gets tired of bowing before his altar and its shrunken human contents, Moran explains that maybe some relatives would like the head as a paper weight for Christmas. If not, he adds, they certainly will be eager to get it at one of the University museums, where people can come in and laugh at the ridiculous taste of the Jibaro tribes...
Something was left out of the account, however. It is easy to imagine the Henry James so pictured as a mildly comic figure in London drawing rooms, but it is impossible to imagine such an individual writing The Beast in the Jungle or The Altar of the Dead. Author Nowell-Smith has traced through their mutations several of the famous inane or incredibly affected remarks attributed to James, by various writers, pointing to an unmistakable conclusion: they were apocryphal. James was a character. Anecdotes were attributed to him, the way jokes about monosyllabic New Englanders were attributed to Calvin Coolidge...