Word: asleep
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some oenophiles, champagne seems a frivolous drink, a pleasant apéritif but unsuitable for consumption throughout a meal. Says Humorist Art Buchwald: "It tastes as though my foot's asleep." Yet, inevitably, the noble, pale gold fluid, its nose-wrinkling bubbles and the sense of care and occasion that accompanies it will always make the wine more of a celebration than a tipple. As they say in the Napa Valley these days, Santé! Bonne...
Muhammad cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb his friend, asleep on the Prophet's gown. Samuel Johnson daily pampered his spoiled companion Hodge with meals of fresh oysters. Victor Hugo cherished Gavroche. Cardinal Richelieu left a generous legacy for the 14 he owned. Napoleon is said to have broken into a cold sweat at the sight of one. In his childhood, Smerdyakov, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, was fond of hanging them. Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray wrote poems to them; Hemingway shared dinner with his. Physician and Scholar Albert Schweitzer favored two ways...
...sensitive ears are precisely tuned to discern the scrabble of paws beneath the ground. It even has its own self-cleaning service: cat saliva may contain a deodorizing detergent-like substance. Asleep, a cat may resemble a throw pillow or a Kliban-style meatloaf, but, awake and hungry, the average feline, one of the most highly evolved predators in the natural world, is capable of dispatching a dozen mice at a brief sitting. Alarmingly, it tends to dawdle before administering the coup de grâce. Behavioralists believe this happens because cats are programmed by a primitive, vestigial stalking mechanism...
...place--sleep--where you can't be, is a metaphor for American restlessness, for all our desires for place and roots. It is a central irony of the poem that in order to achieve the American--or any other kind of--dream, you must be asleep, which these displaced lowans who come to California aren't exactly...
...market, and the export of adulterated foodstuffs to the underdeveloped world. The detachment of Four Good Things, its precision and meditative quiet, are new especially powerful, with the power art sometimes has of stinging us awake. In the last lines of the poem, as the narrator is falling asleep his wife describes to him an afternoon spent skiing...