Word: decay
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...death will become just as controversial. The traditional termination of spontaneous heartbeat and breathing simply is not satisfactory. Emergency techniques have brought back many such clinically "dead." At the other extreme is the guideline of a cautious Dr. Maze, who wrote in 1890 that the first signs of decay should precede burial. For transplant purposes, this caution is a little restrictive...
Newman argues that urban design does not merely suffer from the decay of the social structure, but has contributed to it. The three-year study of major American cities focuses on Urban Renewal's post-World War II "solution" to the problem of lower-income housing, not upon older urban slums. Newman calls that solution "possibly the most cogent ally the criminal has in his victimization of society." Uncoordinated government decisions, combined with the whims of architects bound by little more than limited funds, have produced a motley assortment of often "inadequate and irrational" buildings...
...decay of the city as a whole remains. The scope of Newman's solution is clearly limited. Ironically, one of the drawbacks of "defensible space," which Newman recognizes, is its tendency to displace crime to other areas. "Defensible space" is a solution to a solution -- the problem remains...
...convergence of hatreds. The anticlerical freethinkers of the Enlightenment detested the Jesuits. So did Jansenist Catholics, who adhered to a puritanical view of man's depravity. Their most articulate spokesman was Blaise Pascal, who, in his eloquently satirical Provincial Letters, accused the Jesuits of abetting the decay of Christianity by their lax moral and ascetic teachings. Their papal loyalty, furthermore, infuriated believers in the new nationalism. A magnanimous missionary project in New Spain?the "Paraguay Reductions"?grew into self-sufficient Indian strongholds under Jesuit protection, angering European colonists who spread calumnies against the order. Finally, the Pope bowed...
Still, as demonstrated by Visconti's previous excursions through the darker realms of the German soul (The Damned, Death in Venice), decay in some form or other is the only thing that really interests him. It is thus natural for him to see Ludwig's molars as the mirror of his soul, while ignoring the fact that quite another side of the royal character was expressed in such glorious excesses as the romantic Schloss Neuschwanstein, the rococo Linderhof, and the unfinished imitation of Versailles, Schloss Herrenchiemsee. Ludwig's edifice complex may nearly have bankrupted his kingdom...