Word: beckoned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Especially children's books. At the Christmas season hundreds of new volumes beckon, each with an appealing dust jacket, each with the promise of juvenile delight. It is only upon close examination that the fantasy turns out to be a dream of Ebenezer Scrooge: volumes shaped like rabbits, turtles-everything but books; "relevant" accounts of crime and strife; the latest data on the making of babies-but little about the meaning of love. Still, along the shelves a few items always glitter-works that will be read and reread long after the backs and covers are coated with crayon...
Vivid if not yet widely shared causes go neglected but beckon urgently again: hunger, political reform, environmental issues, inequalities and injustices, economic traumas. The "decline of absolutes" itself is often merely the result of pluralism. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a pluralistic land?" asked Ethicist Paul Ramsey. Pluralism, the sense that "any number can play," whether in religion or ways of life, will not go away. Father John Courtney Murray called it "the human condition." Every day in every way we are aware that "your" and "my" absolutes sometimes clash. Antiabortionists and pro-abortionists...
Louise, unlike most of Kaplan's other characters, just takes it all in. Other peoples' lives beckon her because, ashamed of her past and uncertain of her future, she has so little life of her own. Her self-image is wrapped up in the stigma of "craziness," so she flees from it, finding forgetfulness through absorption in the petty doings of people she scarcely knows...
...parochial artist as the sixtytwo photographs on display in M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery brilliantly prove. Brassai's works confront us as documents and as works of art. They present the appearance of a specific moment in history yet manage to escape a pernicious topicality. Brassai takes pictures that beckon us to return again and again, like his portrait of a peasant sleeping on a train, oblivious to the landscape whizzing by outside his window, his worn and grizzled head thrown back against the seat, his mouth a gaping black hole. Or his photograph of Kiki, a plump and painted chanteuse...
...crises that threatened the very survival of the society. But the phenomenon is wholly unpredictable; there have been numerous upheavals in human history?the medieval plagues in Europe, for example?in which the event did not summon a savior. Ireland's eternal troubles illustrate history's frequent refusal to beckon a great leader with...