Word: emblems
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...liberal spirit in America in the early nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing is not so much a biography of a man as of an age. It is the story of religion, literature and politics in an experimental democracy, and their intimate and inevitable relationships. Channing serves as an emblem of this age, a man whose religious training and thinking helped draw him into political engagement. Delbanco argues that he is more than merely a transitional figure between Edwards and Emerson, and not simply a reticent observer of his new nation. Delbanco writes...
...most worked-out emblem of Leonardo's pessimism occurs toward the end of his life, in the 1510s, with the deluge drawings. In them, the spiral that was his sign for life becomes the symbol, and instrument, of ultimate destruction. Perhaps the germ of these drawings lay in his witnessing, as Clark has suggested, some great flood resembling the one that hit Florence in 1966. In those rhythmical, abstract spirals, like vast shavings from a plane, that emanate from the tumbling mountain, the exploding lake and the destroying clouds, Leonardo found his sign for the dissolution of all matter...
...house is an emblem of the life and the work. It sprawls on Spring Street in lower Manhattan, several blocks east of SoHo's boutiqueland and just above the bustle of Chinatown. Outside, the 19th century red brick structure is at once dignified and haphazard looking. Inside, it becomes a succession of caves: several buildings joined together (one of them a former abortion clinic or else a private lunatic asylum-the stories never tally), with the dividing walls knocked out, so that one goes up and down a series of levels. The floors are black and polished; the rooms...
...large frame, though there is no sign of pulling or strain. It is the body of an actor, of someone used to being scrutinized from all angles, so it has all but willed as tidy and organized an appearance as possible. His size also seems an emblem of his modesty. Lyndon Johnson used to enter a room and rape it. Reagan seems to be in a continual state of receding, a posture that makes strangers lean toward him. In a contest for the same audience, he would draw better than Johnson...
...extraordinarily allusive imagination: forever unpicking its objects, forever recombining them. As the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff remarks at the opening of his brilliant catalogue essay on Cornell as a puritan, he was "a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies-the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles...