Word: edenic
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...GARDEN OF EDEN, Hemingway...
Sometimes an Eden is brought down by the quite literal invasion of the real world, as even the most faraway places get placed in the sights of the superpowers. Tibet was stormed by the Chinese, and now the dreamed-of Shangri- La is vanished forever; Cambodia was caught in a cross fire, and an earthly paradise so gentle that ricksha drivers were said to tip their passengers is now a land of skulls; Afghanistan was overrun by Soviet tanks, and now a book of photographs remembering its fugitive beauties is subtitled, mournfully, Paradise Lost. In an age when airlines...
...mere presence of visitors, moreover, inevitably strips perfection of its most distinctive blessing: its innocence of self-consciousness. As soon as Eden is told that it is Eden, it becomes something else. These days every Arcadia is tempted to regard itself as a potential commodity, and paradise is less often lost than remaindered. The visitor to Nepal, which was long known as the Forbidden Land and closed to foreigners until as recently as 1951, can now stay comfortably at the Hotel Eden in Katmandu. Just around the corner, he can dine at the Paradise Restaurant or the Earth's Heaven...
...sense, paradise is precisely what's lost. Nothing is more incorruptible than what is irretrievable. And just as a good man, once dead, becomes a saint, so a nice place, once quit, becomes an Eden. As the years slide by, the places we have visited are steadily pushed back to an enchanted distance, and memory, the mind's great cosmetician, begins to remove wrinkles, soften edges, touch up the past in a golden glow. The 26-hour bus trip, the simultaneous swarm of hucksters and mosquitoes, the revolutions of the stomach are all forgotten or, better yet, transfigured into...
...been almost eight years since Eden Pastora Gomez, the Sandinistas' legendary "Commander Zero," stormed Managua's National Palace, paving the way for Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle's flight into exile. Soon feeling % powerless in a government that he charged was run by Communists, Pastora helped form the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) and began receiving covert U.S. aid to fight the Sandinistas. But the funds were cut off when Pastora refused to cooperate with other rebel forces...