Word: apercus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors. So thought De Tocqueville, the observer who for more than a century trapped the American character in his shrewd apercus. That character is too mutable to stay contained. Today it is frantically climbing family trees. After Haley's comet, not only blacks but all ethnic groups saw themselves whole, traceable across oceans and centuries to the remotest ancestral village (see LIVING...
Updike is too talented to write un distinguished fiction, and A Month of Sundays contains more than its share of finely wrought apercus: "In the end, fashion overcomes personality: all the mistresses of Louis XV look alike...
...reader, reputed to have a speculative, even impractical mind, and notorious as a bad scientist, seizes on such sentences and enters them in a notebook crammed with similar apercus. In this act, and in its cause (here, Eddington's observation), the reader's temperament is revealed, a temperament at once impatient and imbued with languor, undiscipfiined and ordered. It conspires to receive all ideas as echoes of other ideas, on a diachronic level. In other words, whenever the reader happens to notice an idea which resonates through time, associations clamor like heirs to be recognized, and a number of them...