Word: ascent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gold lick the surrounding dark. In the center of the blazing disk, like a jeweled idol released from a total eclipse, stands the sun god, the Inca, immutable, glorious, incandescent. In another scene, bitter light stipples the Spanish soldiers' helmets and swords as they pantomime their nail-clawing ascent of the Andes, and the men seem wearily stitched into their grey-hued armor as if they had enlisted for eternity. Spookily, stylized Peruvian masks glare, peer and revolve in ritual chorus like puzzled primordial birds. Royal Hunt dazzles the eye as a spectacle...
...decrease in pressure during ascent from the deeps may not be compensated quickly enough-and inequality of pressure in the two ears may upset the sense of balance. In the severe cases reported to Lundgren, some divers said that the surface or the bottom of the sea appeared to tilt at an odd angle, then rotate slowly and even start spinning rapidly. An obvious warning: people who have just had colds should avoid diving...
Peaks & Rinds. But mountaintops were Kazantzakis' habitat. He liked the ascent; it was to him the essential and never ending purpose of life. "We ascended," he writes in an epilogue addressed to Greco, "because the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise." He preferred rarefied air and the panoramic view. "Rinds they were," he says, contemptuously discarding the "details of daily life...
...portent was fulfilled in a blaze of genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet's descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him "the most universal of poets in the modern languages," and added: "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth...
...canticles, is an allegory of a process the church calls conversion and the psychoanalysts individuation. Purgatory, as Dante conceives it, is formed in the shape of a mountain. Around the mountain, like a mighty serpent, winds a path that spirals upward to the summit. At seven stages of the ascent are situated seven cornices, and on each of them penitents purge one of the seven deadly sins. The proud plod under heavy burdens; the envious wander with eyelids sewn shut; the gluttonous gaze at inaccessible fruit. As Dante and Virgil ascend, they meet famous figures of the Middle Ages engaged...