Word: decayed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dominating the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted-"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih...
Hawkes is preoccupied with decay, with the rust on an abandoned gun or the fungus on a dead soldier. He is preoccupied with disgust, with the technical details of wringing a chicken's neck or the inept skinning of a fox. He is preoccupied with the warriors and valkyries of the German folk-myths...
...things you know. It is perfectly good advice, as sound as it is trite, but sometimes discouraging to youngsters who discover that what they know has long been grist for other writers' mills. Young (22) Louisiana-born, Harvard-bred Speed Lamkin knows a lot about the decline and decay of the old plantation set, who made small talk while energetic commoners made big money and powered the New South. In his first novel, Tiger in the Garden, Lamkin boldly washes some old sectional linen in public, as if it hadn't already been scrubbed by the Caldwells, Weltys...
...pillaging the world of natural resources," he continued, "because we do not recognize that God has put us here as tenants; in like manner, unless we recognize that there is a basic morality, we will be creating a social erosion, an inner decay and disillusionment...
Many scientists, calculating by the rate of decay of radioactive materials in rocks, have figured that the earth is about two billion years old. This week, in a report issued by the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Edinburgh's Professor Arthur Holmes had a new estimate. Two billion years, said Holmes, is a "conservative minimum." Something nearer 3,350,000,000 years, he added cautiously, "is unlikely to be seriously wrong...