Word: decays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...repetitions of images called up by his younger self. They speak out of awareness of the past, his deep national feeling, his sense of himself within his race and as seer and singer. He writes of spirals, gyres, staircases to be climbed, a freedom and loftiness that defy horizontal decay...
...graffiti on its paws and Mamluk soldiers used its face as a rifle target. But the saddest indignity suffered over the centuries by Egypt's Great Sphinx of Giza has stemmed from erosion, seemingly caused by a single enemy-the relentless desert wind. At the present rate of decay, experts say, the 64-foot-high figure could be reduced to a mound of dust in five to ten centuries...
...monument poses fresh problems for conservationists. It has also triggered a scientific and political controversy. A chemical analysis of the Sphinx by K. Lal Gauri, 48, a stone-preservation expert at the University of Louisville, suggests that salt, not wind, is the main cause behind the statue's decay...
Furthermore, it began to appear likely that Harvard has no plans yet to replant the ivy when the Houses are all spruced up again-that, in fact, the ivy was partially responsible for the structural decay that prompted the massive renovation. The plant's tendrils, it seems, secrete a substance that slowly eats away at a wall's mortar and cement...
...spectacular paysage moralisé in his work was the motif for two versions of The Jewish Cemetery, circa 1655. This gloomy landscape pullulates with symbols: the broken tree over the dark brook, suggesting a bridge across the Styx; the wan rainbow; the ruins, the air of desolation, transience and decay; and the crystalline, stony geometry of the tombs. Their purity interested Goethe, who would later design an abstract memorial for himself. "Even in their ruined state," he declared, Ruisdael's monuments "point to a past beyond the past; they are tombs of themselves," abstractions of an abstraction...