Word: epical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Violence. A year after Warsaw's liberation, in the thick of an epic and revolutionary reconstruction, Poland still struggled to define her freedom. Theoretically, the definition would be given in national elections. Theoretically, as the Big Three had pledged at Yalta, the vote would be "free and unfettered." But, as Stenia's Tommy gun witnessed, theory for Poland was much simpler than fact...
...This Silence? Mann admits a lifelong debt to four great writers: Goethe, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. Of Goethe ("the molder of a majestic personal culture") and of Tolstoy ("the primitive epic force"), Mann has often written with "enthusiastic eloquence." But he could never bring himself to write a line about Nietzsche (who suffered from creeping paralysis) or Dostoevsky (an epileptic). "Why," asks Mann, "this evasion . . . this silence...
Geometricians of Virtue. "This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. Under the name of Nemesis, it functions as the mainspring of Aeschylus' tragedies. To the Pythagoreans, to Socrates and Plato, it was the jumping-off point of speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. Wherever Hellenism has penetrated, we find the idea of it familiar. . . . The Occident, however, has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express...
...Such is the spirit of the only true epic the Occident possesses...
...Nothing the peoples of Europehave produced is worth the first known poem that appeared among them. Perhaps they will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question...