Word: customs
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Brecht's vision of the theater as a classroom works ideally in Galileo. To the audience, the great astronomer plays teacher, a kind of intellectual locksmith picking at the rusty encrustations of habit, custom and tradition as he elucidates his proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. This Galileo is a glutton of food, wine and ideas. As one character says, he has "thinking bouts." As Brecht sees it, this very appetite is Galileo's fatal flaw. His desire to save his skin ranks above any devotion to a pure priesthood of science, any will to suffer...
Sweet & Pungent. Any less stringent reform, O'Brien argued, could only be "painful and difficult" because of the "restrictive jungle of legislation and custom that has grown up around the Post Office Department." If the telephone system were run as the mails are, he said, "the carrier pigeon business would still have a great future." In view of the postal service's snowballing problems (TIME, Dec. 30), the idea of a quasiindependent agency similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority offers some compelling advantages...
...settled by many retired Roman legionnaires, along with emigrant Greeks, Jews and native Egyptians. It became, according to Egyptologist William Peck, 34, a "prosperous, highly civilized region with a well-developed bureaucratic system of local government, and an elaborate social structure, fairly comparable to Detroit." By a fluke of custom and climate, the residents of Faiyum are today among the best known-or at least most clearly visualized-citizens of classic times. On display last week at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Peck is associate curator of ancient and medie val art, were lifelike portraits of 23 of Faiyum...
...trial marriages is William Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, one of the leading "Death-of-God" thinkers, who suggests that a betrothal period in which sexual relations are licit would actually be in accord with the marital patterns that prevailed in the time of Christ. Under early Jewish custom, couples who became betrothed often lived as man and wife, without being required to enter permanent marriage. By this custom, if either party objected to formalizing the union, it could be dissolved by a religious court...
Modest though such prerogatives may seem to outsiders, they constitute a vital return to ancient custom for the rural Vietnamese, whose whole harsh span of years may well be lived out within a ten-mile radius of his village birthplace. The conquering Chinese in 207 B.C. first organized the Vietnamese into close-knit villages, with a council of elders and a headman who was priest, welfare worker and justice of the peace all in one. When the Chinese were thrown out, the forms remained and took root in an almost feudal system of loyalty to locality. But with the coming...