Word: descent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...halfway down the sheer steps from a pagoda towering over Peking's Summer Palace, which was the breathtaking extravagance of the Ching dynasty's Dowager Empress Ci xi; she diverted $50 million worth of silver earmarked for her navy to rebuild the paradise. Ford pondered the steep descent, and his mind wandered back home to the Rockies. "This would be a good ski slope-there's a nice turn down there," he mused. He would have been better off in Vail. What he accomplished in Peking could have been done by Mailgram...
James Schlesinger was back in a little office last week, stuffing his pipe full of Sir Walter Raleigh, quoting Heraclitus ("Character is destiny"), pondering his singular journey through the high corridors of power and his sudden descent. He had for the moment somewhat the look of a trapped creature, with the low ceiling of the office at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies pressing down...
...continent: ravaged by years of misgovernment, terrorism from the left and right, inflation that runs at 20% to 30% a month, despair and cynicism among the large and seemingly helpless bourgeoisie. How this highly favored land, with its 10 ft. of topsoil and 25 million homogeneous people of European descent, achieved such a colossal mess defies understanding. For the past six weeks the word has been that a coup could come any day, with the army taking over from the pathetic Isabel Peron, but there is only modest hope that this would make matters noticeably better...
Exhibition, a French documentary about Claudine's life, loves and heavy thoughts, has certain pretenses at social and psychological significance. The heroine may be observed, shedding tears in closeup, as she tells how she was raped by an uncle when she was only 15. This assault precipitated a descent into prostitution and an unfortunate marriage in which her soldier husband insisted on having a child against his wife's express wishes. "He tied me down to the bed and everything," she reveals. All of this occurred before Claudine's ascent to stardom in a series of quickies...
...hither and yon; they sketch out the tracery of ganglia and dendrons that made up Joyce's character, from the tip of his penis to the top of his cerebrating cells. In Richard Ellmann's collection of Joyce letters this sketch becomes fuller in direct proportion to the descent of the nervous charge from the brain to the genitals...