Word: cane
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...Remember, young man," he told me, as I am sure he had told hundreds of aspiring writers before me, "Writing is an excellent cane--but a very poor crutch...
Since then, the valley, eleven miles long and four miles wide, has been bulldozed into a flat green sea of paddy and sugar-cane fields dotted with hamlets. The valley has seen its population triple in three decades to nearly 100,000, of whom 30,000 came from Thai Binh province, southeast of Hanoi...
...forced General Henri Navarre, the French commander in chief in Indochina, to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu. "Why were we successful?" he asks. "President Ho Chi Minh found a path: the combination of the struggle for national independence and the struggle for socialism." In a nearby sugar-cane field, close to where hundreds of French soldiers are said to be buried, the Vietnamese are erecting a modest monument to their foes: a plain white cross inside a bamboo fence...
...ancient Greece, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx: "What is it that goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?" Answer: Man. (First he appears as a crawling baby, then upright in maturity, then in old age with a cane.) The Old Testament yields some difficult puzzles and praises those who solve them, like the prophet Daniel: "A notable spirit, with . .. the gift of interpreting dreams, explaining riddles and unbinding spells...
...best ways I've found to help one to develop," he advised Wednesday night, "is to concentrate on something simple. It might turn out to be harder than you think." Bowie waved his cane again and said. "All right, now let's have some B-flat blues...