Word: cyclic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with that insufficient realization their deepest humanity, along with their deepest art, slips away, much as the suicidal dagger slips from his hand and slants into the sea. In the terrific scene with the Queen, magnificent as he is, Olivier seems to stop at the brink of the cyclic, self-devouring, sadistic desperation which Shakespeare so clearly wrote into that page...
...Steppingstones. "If religion is a chariot, it looks as if the wheels on which it mounts towards Heaven may be the periodic downfalls of civilization on Earth. It looks as if the movement of civilization may be cyclic and recurrent, while the movement of religion may be on a single continuous upward line. The continuous upward movement of religion may be served and prompted by the cyclic movement of civilizations round the cycle of birth-death-birth...
...this cyclic condition...
...Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell's force, cut off in the bowels of Burma, came out of its position with a rush, jammed into the Jap communication lines above Mandalay and made havoc. Some of the Jap forces swung back to meet him, and there, by a strange cyclic development, Japanese fought toward the south and Chinese toward the north...
Though history was, to Joyce, "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," he made some frightening images of the history of his time. Finnegans Wake derives much from the 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...