Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...instant of maximum scrunch, the core continues its collapse indefinitely, forming a bizarre object of infinitesimal size and nearly infinite density, with a gravitational field so intense that light itself cannot escape -- a black hole. In effect, the entire, tremendous mass of the star has gone down a cosmic drain...
...third suggestion, the Overpowering Assumption, I think, is best. But not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it might be accepted. It is rarely "accepted;" we aren't here to accept or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions--that is by the use of the overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it was pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact it isn't obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted assumption...
...gurus, Sibyls and purveyors of every kind of therapeutic nostrum. One does not need a planchette to deduce that an exhibition which demonstrates as clearly as this one how great painters like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky conceived their art in terms of thought forms, astral vibrations and hidden cosmic symbolism is bound to attract a far larger audience than any orthodox show of abstract...
...reflects a desire to express spiritual, utopian or metaphysical ideals that cannot be expressed in traditional pictorial terms." One typical preoccupation was with the idea that the universe, instead of being the vast agglomeration of distinct things perceived by science or realism, was a single, living entity, pervaded by "cosmic" energies; these revealed themselves in "vibrations," the formative agents of all material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles and Kandinsky's floating circles are to be read as a kind of sacred geometry, pyramid power in paint. Hence, too, the peculiar...