Word: benisons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...neck cops on a country road, the bombing of her synagogue, a distant but moving exposure to the force of Martin Luther King Jr.'s oratory all have their effect on her. But mostly it is the simple presence of a good man that grants her age's greatest benison, expanding rather than shrinking her humanity...
...constant in the lives of millions of youthful American immigrants. Growing up in two cultures is at once a source of frustration and delight, shame and pride, guilt and satisfaction. It can be both a barrier to success and a goad to accomplishment, a dislocating burden or an enriching benison. First-generation Americans have an "astonishing duality," declares Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, himself the son of an English immigrant. "They tend to have a more heightened awareness both of being American and also of being connected to another country...
Since then, succeeding crowns have given benison...
That streak is well hidden in Heaney's verse, which, like Yeats', mixes the familiar-domestic animals, the aroma of a country afternoon, the benison of a homecoming-with the stuff of legend-myth-haunted Gaelic songs, the discovery of a 1,000-year-old man buried in peat. For Heaney, objects always cast a long shadow: the observation of a skunk, of all animals, brings on a longing for his absent wife: "Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer/ For the black plunge-line nightdress...
...comedy of manners-public manners in this case, not private ones as in Annie Hall or Manhattan. In Yiddish it means blessed, and Zelig is, surely, in the midst of a typical American summer at the movies when almost everything is a loud assault on the senses, a benison. It is both a welcome wooing of sensibility and intellect and a film that will be recalled long after Labor Day has come and gone. -By Richard Schickel