Word: ascent
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...have a hard time accepting the notion that history is not a steady ascent, that it can move us from high civilization to barbarism, from democracy to dictatorship, from licentiousness to prudery -- and back. During the past hundred years, let alone the past thousand, we have made almost unbelievable material and social progress; what has not changed is the nature of humanity and our never ending challenge: to keep working, to keep mending, to keep building. It has been suggested that Sisyphus is the myth most typical of the human condition. A better choice might be Faust, who, after...
...affable, unimpressive public man improbably rises to great power, and it transpires that the master of his ascent is a strong-willed watchdog of a wife with an ambition as long as her enemies list. That political scenario is as classic as Lady Macbeth and as modern as Nancy Reagan, and it was just those predecessors that Marilyn Quayle was being compared to last week. After six months of investigation by Bob Woodward and David Broder, the Washington Post unfurled a seven-part series on Vice President Dan Quayle in which most of the critical scrutiny appeared to be directed...
Still, we were lucky. The weather was overcast and dry -- perfect climbing conditions. When the official investigators made the journey in 1990, it had been cold and rainy, turning the ascent into a treacherous hands-and-knees affair...
Nonetheless, because they've come to stay, "the Russians," as they're often called, may in the long run be part of the salvation of their new homeland. They joined the aliyah (literally, "the ascent") in order to move up in the world. They didn't leave an expansionist, totalitarian empire that repressed its minorities only to become citizens of a garrison state at war with its neighbors as well as with 1.7 million embittered, disfranchised and mutinous Palestinians...
Besides, it's all in a kind of museum, if you half-close your eyes. The Gagosian Gallery, perhaps because its ascent from selling posters on the West Coast to flogging $10 million De Koonings has been so short and steep, goes to great lengths to surround its wares with the aura of a museum rather than that of a shop. It has even hired a guard to stand at the entrance to the room in which Salle's six new paintings are displayed, presumably in case some collector from the bottom of the waiting list is seized...