Word: cataclysmal
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Written in 1904, Summerfolk was prescient about the 1905 revolution in Russia, which was a dress rehearsal for the cataclysm that brought the Bolsheviks to power twelve years later. Reflecting the boredom and despair of the Russian middle class, it is Gorky's most Chekhovian work. It follows, without an obvious plot, the lives and loves of the summer folk who spend their vacations, as always, in cottages in the woods. Sellars, 26, who came to national attention with a production of The Inspector General at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard while he was still an undergraduate there...
...whom they both revile and revere to this day. When one talks to those who knew Mao personally, one comes across an exquisite perplexity as they try to untangle the revolution from the man who made it, the hero of the revolution from the villain who brought it to cataclysm. Those who attended him during his glory days and in his madness wonder what caused the devilish change in him, as well as when it took place...
...worry was that I would trip, or that I would be stunned by some unexpected, spontaneous cataclysm inside...
...cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage) did not seem commensurate with the effect (the resignation of the President), not in the usual Newtonian laws of action and reaction. Watergate was more like an event in quantum physics. A particle of history as minuscule as an atom produced a cataclysm...
...work if put to the test of reality. Many fear that the detonation of even one nuclear weapon in a conflict would be like firing a particle into the nucleus of an atom; nuclear war would mimic nuclear fission. The result would be a chain reaction of chaos and cataclysm, warheads flying back and forth with increasing recklessness and ultimately random, total destruction...