Word: bend
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...Today story, debate rages over whether this newly sloganized "insist and assist" attitude - set the standards and bend over backward helping everybody get through - constitutes a lowering of the bar or an enlightenment of philosophy. In the age of push-button wars and untold desk jobs, isn't the Army just being smart by being patient? Or is a 10 percent failure rate - from serious injury or mental incompatibility, usually - an insult to the supposed test of mettle that boot camp was once supposed...
...Just making sure you owe him for life. Now, you act, sing, dance and bend spoons with your mind. Have you made some kind of pact with the devil...
America was created by people riding its rivers--the most fruitful, profitable places to settle lying just around the bend. The country itself was a bend in the river, a story about to be disclosed, a promise of progress--that, of course, and a murder plot. Following rivers with Indian names, the latest Americans could kill off the first. For better and worse, the Old World married the New by a band of water...
...wonder so many American artists have written, sung, painted and even gone round the bend, gone mad, in the name of rivers. In his overboard essay on Huck and Jim, Leslie Fiedler wrote that the river supports "the American dream of isolation afloat." Out of that isolation in motion comes every inspiration, from contemplation (Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers") to adventure (Hemingway's stories) to despair. The poet John Berryman looked down into the Mississippi and jumped to his death. The river is expanse, but it is also loneliness; Huck finds a loving relationship with...
America lies around the bend in the river, but it is the bend itself that determines the country's worth. Somewhere in that curve is the capacity to start over and do it right. Somewhere too is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in which no lesson takes hold. The river carries the country into its sin and grandeur and magnificent contradictions. Deciding to free Jim and himself, Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," referring to salvation...