Word: dreadfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mindless Azagoth. University specialists in strange languages could not place-much less decipher-the grim words I had heard so distinctly. I had no recourse, therefore, but to revert to Lovecraft's own works, where I discovered that the sentence means, "In his house at R' lyeh dread Cthulu waits dreaming." It seems Lovecraft created a whole mythology, complete with guttural Asiatic incantations, to support his twelve best stories. The basic notion was that countless eons ago, Earth had been taken over by an extraterrestrial race which, in the practice of black magic, had lost its hegemony...
...latter-day equivalent of Greek tragedy, Kott recommends, as a salient example, the spectacle of a paralyzed man confronting a woman half-buried alive: Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, "the final version of the Prometheus myth." Nor does Kott fail to provide the unerringly apt caption-Sophocles' dread-filled line, "Nothing surpasses not being born...
Papa Doc is dead, and the title of President for Life has passed to his son Jean-Claude, 21. Under the comparatively benign rule of "Baby Doc," the activities of the dread secret police known as the Tontons Macoutes (Creole for bogeymen) have been curbed. The ostentatious display of military presence has been muted, although rifle-bearing police and militiamen can still be seen on the streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital. Even more important from the tourists' viewpoint Jean-Claude has extended a welcoming hand to foreign investors and visitors...
...Randers wait in mingled hope and dread for word of Sergeant First Class Donald Rander of Army Intelligence, captured at Hue on Feb. 1, 1968. Shortly thereafter two fellow soldiers who escaped reported that he had been wounded in the arm but was alive in a Viet Cong prison camp in South Viet Nam. There has been no word from Rander in five years. So his women wait, worry and try to pretend that there is holly in their hearts...
...concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before the landscape we inhabit: these are all sensations which, like the reader's bookshelves, belong to some taxonomic order...