Word: diana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This has been a year of big stories. The death of Princess Diana tapped a wellspring of modern emotions and highlighted a change in the way we define news. The cloning of an adult sheep raised the specter of science outpacing our moral processing power and had a historic significance that will ripple through the next century. But the story that had the most impact on 1997 was the one that had the most impact throughout this decade: the growth of a new economy, global in scope but brought home in the glad tidings of personal portfolios, that has been...
...little girl who learned she had been expected to be a little boy. So intent were her parents on a son that they failed to prepare for the possibility of her appearance, and she had to wait till the week after her birth to receive her full name: Diana Frances Spencer. Two older sisters (and the brother who eventually arrived) would have royal godparents, but her father and mother chose commoners to swear their faith for her at the baptismal font...
...child her parents conceived just before her, a boy who had lived barely 10 hours. If he had survived, she often wondered, would she have existed? Or would her mother, having produced a male heir, have left her husband for another man earlier than she did, before Diana could be born? After her parents split up, Diana bravely declared that she would marry only once, and only for love, and never, ever divorce...
...battleground, a field of overt tension in which mass emotions might rise to an occasion. Instead, there was the presence of absence, which eats at the mind quietly and which can, when touched by one last straw, incite a riot. It may be that the death of Diana came simply as one loss and absence too many. Whatever else Diana was in the world, she effected a lovely presence, and who could not weep for the loss of that? Gone, Diana seemed to emblemize the word; she was everything gone. One grief stood for all. As in any epiphany, many...
...then there is Diana, the woman who was, all by herself, the punctum of the late 20th century. She was, for one thing, the princess and the pauper, the improbably lustrous creature who also carried her (our?) mere humanity into the throne room. Sometimes the grief at her death seemed out of proportion, but only if you forgot the real question it presented: If the most luminous woman in the world can die, what hope is there for the rest...