Word: calf
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...Calf, Solzhenitsyn makes a great deal of my supposed naivete, my impracticality and especially my susceptibility to "pernicious" influences. Among those who (in his view) have hitched themselves to "this strange, huge, conspicuous balloon, which was soaring to the heights without engine or petrol" -- me -- Solzhenitsyn's sharpest, if covert, thrusts are aimed at my wife. Her "deleterious" influence, he suggests, led me to harp on emigration by Jewish refuseniks -- people "who did not feel that Russia was their own country...
...shame that Solzhenitsyn understood so little about me, my thoughts on emigration, human rights and other matters, and about the real Lusia and her true role in my life. Late in 1974 a German correspondent brought me a gift from Solzhenitsyn, a copy of The Oak and the Calf, with a warm and complimentary inscription from the author. I already knew what was in it, and when I saw the inscription, I couldn't help exclaiming, "Solzhenitsyn really offended me in this book...
Still, a puritan conscience recoils a little from the sheer power of photographs. They have lingering about them the ghost of the golden calf -- the bright object too much admired, without God's abstract difficulties. Great photographs bring the mind alive. Photographs are magic things that traffic in mystery. They float on the surface, and they have a strange life in the depths of the mind. They bear watching...
Lodge takes care to keep these two evenly matched, each as disconcertingly perceptive and sweetly ridiculous as the other. Sexually, it is Robyn who is the lighthearted aggressor and Vic who, after spending a single night with her, turns into a love-sick calf and begins making alarming declarations about leaving his "podge" of a wife. Robyn, ever the teacher, expounds poststructuralist literary theory to him in bed, explaining that what he mistakes for love is merely a rhetorical device, a bourgeois fallacy. "Haven't you ever been in love, then?" he asks. "When I was younger," she replies...
...guests toast the newborn rhino. The calf, who according to Bentsen arrived looking more like a wrinkly little moose than a rhino, is now a 70-lb. miniature of its mother with a tiny stump of a horn sprouting from its nose. The curious youngster, who is just learning rhino etiquette, leaves its mother's side to approach the visitors on the other side of the bars. It paws the ground, huffing and snorting like a grownup pachyderm...