Word: delights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been the remarkable turnabout in Americans' estimation of their bricks-and-mortar legacy. In their new appreciation of the old, well-made, neglected structures in their midst, one New Yorker notes wryly, city dwellers resemble the estimable bourgeois gentilhomme of Moliere's play who discovers to his delight that he has unconsciously been speaking prose all his life...
Mass-produced delight...
Humor is his usual vehicle, but he can also write with a haunting strain of melancholy, with delight or, as in his 1974 meditation on inflation-pinched old people shopping timidly at the supermarket, with shame and outrage: "Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for its price, putting it back... Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming...
Downing Street was packed with well-wishers and photographers when Thatcher arrived. Expressing delight and excitement over her victory, Britain's "Iron Lady" made a conciliatory statement clearly addressed to a nation poised uneasily for change: "I would like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi, which I think are particularly apt at the moment: 'Where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; where there is despair, may we bring hope.' Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country...
...charms of boarding Thomas' train of thought is the puckish delight he takes in turning beliefs or assumptions upside down. The current to-do about the likelihood of cloning humans? Not worth worrying about, Thomas says, and impossible besides. But (and most of his essays pivot merrily on that word) he has a suggestion for those who cannot resist tinkering: "Set cloning aside, and don't try it. Instead go in the other direction. Look for ways to get mutations more quickly, new variety, different songs." Continued genetic errors, after all, enabled the primeval strand...