Word: circa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Cynara's voice and character are, in fits and starts, inspired and inspiring. Newly emancipated and literate, she acquires, by virtue of what she calls her "crazy quilt" education, an arresting fictional presence. She can be blunt, circa the 1870s--"There is a lot of Indian in her nigger"--and sometimes poetic: "Mothers grow flaccid, rich in babylove, each baby taking some of the mother's beauty as if the baby knows it needs to protect its babyself by making Mama less kiss-daddy pretty." Why shouldn't the loyal slaves enshrined in the magnolia myth of GWTW, novel...
...work of both there is often a half-submerged meeting of the sacred and the profane. A beautiful and touching example is De Hooch's Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The little girl kneeling down in that shadowed interior might be engaged in prayer, but in fact she is submitting to one of the commonest hygienic rituals of 17th century childhood --her attentive mother picking through her hair for lice...
...painters showed her bathing with her nymphs (good opening for a painter to show what he could do with pretty nudes) and spied upon by a Peeping Tom of a hunter, Actaeon; whereat the virgin moon goddess, her modesty offended, changed him into a stag. In Vermeer's version, circa 1653-54, there is no Actaeon, no river, no nakedness, and instead of plunging into the stream, Diana is merely having her foot washed in a basin by a nymph--Christian paganism, complete with that image of spiky, untouchable virtue, a thistle, sprouting by her side...
These scenes aren't necessarily just slices of life. Sometimes they are suffused with symbolic references. A case in point is the exquisite Woman with a Balance, circa 1663-64. A young and beautiful housewife stands at a table on which are scattered her more precious worldly goods--strings of pearls (including a rare set of "black" pearls, which are actually gunmetal gray), gold and silver coins, and boxes that presumably contain more small treasures. She gazes with rapt attention at a jeweler's balance, which has nothing in either scale; she is checking that the empty balance hangs level...
...course, with tax law notorious for its intricacies, generalizations about its institution are difficult. U.S. tax law has grown from an estimated 11,400 words in 1913 to circa 7 million words today; the IRS employs 114,000 people and sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions each year (enough for 15 million 500-page books; compare Widener’s 3.2 million volumes). Still, “I dues” continue to unite Americans as they have through the country’s brief history...