Word: axioms
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...pillar hermit. He promptly sheds all his clothes, capers among the fronds, and calls down unintelligible holy statements. Comments the narrator: "I could not resist a vague intellectual empathy toward the man who was now an abstraction - who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs all his responsibilities to live adrift on a river in an open boat. There, fading from the reader's view, he seeks the spiritual dimension: the third bank of the river...
According to one school of thought (which is not to be encouraged), people may buy certain kinds of products even though they hate the commercial. The axiom drawn from all this is that contempt breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds sales. The recently retired White Knight (for Ajax cleanser) was the most ridiculed horseman since Don Quixote. He galloped so many laps around the plains of suburbia 1,000,000 in five years that after a while, he became a rather endearing symbol of camp. What is more, according to one claim, his magic lance added a not-so-subliminal phallic...
...include "Norman Mailer and a couple of children in tennis shoes deciding to levitate the Pentagon"; its politicians include such men as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who thinks that "a President with too much power is a President without Schlesinger at his side"; its liberal economics lean to the quaint axiom that "there is some virtue in elongating the distance between where a dollar is collected and where it is spent...
...cited India, Japan, Israel and, surprisingly, Formosa. But he emphasized that in any area of the world where the nation's commitments are less binding, the U.S. should very cautiously balance possible losses against anticipated gains. Kennedy was far less precise, at least three times reiterated his campaign axiom that while the U.S. could not honestly ignore its international responsibilities, "I don't think we can be the policemen of the world...
...current exhibit demonstrates, Braidwood's own quest has been to document that momentous episode in history when man changed from nomadic hunter to settled farmer. According to an old archaeological axiom, the transition took place thousands of years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the lush Middle Eastern flatlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Largely as a result of Braidwood's spadework, the Fertile Crescent theory has been buried. Most of his colleagues now agree with him that man actually abandoned his vagrant ways as early as 7000 B.C. and set up his first farm villages...