Word: caveness
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Comparing the present fight with the primitive warfare of cave men, he asked the man who carries on as usual behind the lines, "How can you justify yourself as the maker of bows and arrows to the mother of one who is shooting them...
Everything, it seems at first, is in this book; such ghoulish, semi-slang tintypes as "God's image cut in ebony" (for Negro); such beautifully graphic trade terms as the miner's "snow" (for the sifting of earth presaging a cave-in), the ballplayer's "floater" (for a slow ball), the prostitute's "pivot" (for solicitation from a window). Practically all the unmailable words turn up, along with a tremendous set of their variants and embellishments. So does the surrealist language of drug addicts, the high-heeled dialect of perverts, the likable archaisms of lumberjacks (they...
...growing kind of fat herself. The story involves a colony of Negroes living on a subtropical island who, we couldn't figure out exactly why, can't subsist without a descendant of the white founders watching over them from the ancestral mansion. For two hours, Madeleine chases Stirling from cave to bamboo-tree, limping rather creditably through a script so bad that it makes even the talented Flora Robson appear ridiculous...
This was a real fight, out in the open, with no punches pulled. It was a hopeful sign. In the old defense agencies there had seldom been a really good fight. Down OPM's endless corridors, challenges and sneers had burrowed like voices in a cave, diminishing to futile silence: when all was quiet again, nothing had changed, nothing had been settled...
...philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory of history, which is highly apposite to the present. According to Vico, and Joyce, the first of a civilization's four phases begins, and the last collapses, in fear of thunder, and a rush for underground shelter; and in that sheltering cave, religion and family life begin again. Today the ambiguous thunder talks above every great city of the earth, and the shelters are crowded, and a civilization, if it is ending, is no less surely germinal. In one great warning work of literature after another, meanwhile, a similar mental cavern...