Word: calm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...President, a noted historian reported, had a calm confidence that great things would be accomplished, that he could perceive, through God, what those things were, that he had the energy and artistry to communicate them persuasively...
...briskness and decisiveness about every movement, and whatever he may have felt, he did not betray it by as much as the movement of an eyelash. Yet he did not play as one in a dream, as people sometimes do at supreme crises: he was just entirely calm and entirely natural...
...Naipaul's fiction, the landscape, mental as well as actual, has grown ever more terrifying. By contrast, he approaches India with a calm, almost religious detachment. The narrative is often mordant as it describes the dissonance of Indian life: the mutilated beggar children and the fashionable holy men, complete with pressagents; the landless peasants fleeing the villages for the city pavements, the infuriating smugness of the privileged...
...defeat, Naipaul believes, and Hinduism has perpetuated the resulting defeatism by encouraging withdrawal and human separation. Moreover, Gandhian nonviolence swiftly degenerated from a framework for social action to total laxity, in Naipaul's view, and helped lead India to "an acceptance of karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm...
Then there is the almost legendary story of the calm, collected Fairbank and his frantic graduate student who could not manage to turn in his thesis. After Fairbank's usual strategy of telephoning the delaying student at 8 p.m. on Sunday failed to persuade him to work a little faster, Fairbank showed up at the student's home at that ungodly hour--to pay a visit. (Ungodly, that is, for the grad student; for Fairbank, who is always home by 10 p.m. no matter what the occasion, it was the middle of the morning.) Fairbank noticed a mass of typewritten...