Word: cocoon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Across the unhappy island, barbed-wire barricades cocoon key buildings, seal Greek and Turkish Cypriots into separate quarters. British Tommies man machine guns on the minarets of Turkish mosques. Cyprus' nightly lullaby is the baying of search dogs. When the sirens signal curfew, the island's economy is paralyzed (loss per day: about $120,000 of Cyprus' gross daily income of $290,000). Factories are closed for lack of labor and materials. But no sooner does the curfew lift than terrorists kill another victim...
Slowly, surely, Guinness devours his part. Like a cannibal, he gnaws away at the physical details. But what he is really after is the soul. When he gets it, the gestures are pushed aside like a cocoon, and a new existence emerges. Indeed, Alec's essential gift is not for creating characters, but existences. His people are all somehow like children, playing alone in corners, a life unto themselves. "His is the art of public solitude," says Critic Tynan. "He can seem unobserved...
...loked out the plate-glass window as marquee lights winked off and Boston gathered itself into a cocoon. "No parades and no tablespoons today. Worlds revolve, nations change hands, but I just stand here, consciously dead. I crawled from loins too old with life. I am a creature of specialization, a power paddle that keeps the wheel going. I look knowledgeable; I laugh at the right jokes; I voice the proper introspective comments about the latest Book-of-the-Month Club classic. I am a vegetable...
...young son sailing. Not even the Queen herself was immune from her husband's restless energy. "I think Prince Philip is mad," she once exclaimed to a palace servant, as her husband, bored stiff with a moment of inactivity, darted out of the palace door in a cocoon of sweaters, to "work up a sweat." During their marriage, Elizabeth has succeeded to some extent in calming her impetuous husband, restraining his often explosive impatience ("Philip," she is often heard to remonstrate, "don't get so annoyed!") and curbing his quarterdeck vocabulary. By way of return, Philip himself...
Crisis of Hate. At this crisis point, Robert falls in with his religious neighbors, the Gornacs. Widowed Elisabeth Gornac emerges from a cocoon of pale respectability to mother Robert and even to further his love affair with Paula. Her grown son, Pierre, a devout Roman Catholic of a gloomy Jansenite cast, hates all that Robert stands for. Though he is pietistically given to "searching his heart, calling God to witness," and laboriously examining his motives, he nonetheless tattles to Paula about Robert's past...