Word: arcana
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...corpses are strung from trees and sleeps beside angels in deserted churches. He sees the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea (until her batteries give out), and he finds himself one of 12 defusers alone in a city without lights. Woven through such flights are colorful threads of historical arcana: richly researched evocations of the "desert Englishmen" of the '30s, lilting allusions to Herodotus and Kipling, catalogs of the winds that blow across the sands. The result is a realism that could not be more magical: "I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book...
Luckily, the fat envelopes came in July. And both of us, oddly enough, ended up at Harvard. If I'd stayed at MIT, I'd learning about queueing systems and computation structures. instead, I now fill my head with arcana about American governmental institutions, Soviet disintegration and the meaning of the state. I'm glad I switched...
...wait for a spot in the store's parking lot. Inside, crowds jam the supplement section, which gleams with row upon row of small, white-capped vials. Here the true believers in the gospel of vitamins linger over labels, comparing brand names and dosages, trading health sermons and nutritional arcana. They discuss the relative merits of Buffered C and Lysine, as opposed to Bio-C Plus Rose Hips, or perhaps Bio- Absorbate Vitamin C Complex capsules. There are no fewer than 10 types and dosages of vitamin C to choose from, not to mention eight of vitamin...
...that fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places; later Barcelona was the home of the first submarine and the world capital of anarchism. Discoursing with authority on such arcana as bourgeois hairstyles of the 19th century, and spicing up his narrative with his own juicily vernacular translations of Catalan poetry, Hughes lights up even the structure of Catalan fishing nets with indelibly vivid descriptions ("gauzy forecourts and inner rooms hanging in the sea, into which whole schools of tuna...
...cold reality of 10 sites scattered across 620 sq. mi. of mountainside. These genuinely did seem the small-town Games, the Games of one-lane roads and gyms turned into press centers. True, the main street of Albertville had become a huge window display for such arcana as smiling M&M's on skis, a version of the Olympic mascot, Magique, made entirely of chocolates and other gadgets Olympiques. Billboards around town featured uplifting quotations from Andre Gide and Catullus, while discos offered such unlikely come-ons as "La Nuit du Single People." But for the most part, the Savoyards...