Word: fig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...FIG TREE (192 pp.) - Aubrey Menen - Scribner...
...Fig Tree's hero Harry Wesley is an English Nobel-prizewinning biologist with a yen to help humanity. His secret weapon is desoxyribonucleic acid. Injected into a plant or tree, this chemical will increase phenomenally the size and quality of the yield. An enterprising Italian government official named Pozzo feels that this is just the cure for the barren poverty of southern Italy. Above the Bay of Salerno, on some terraced soil blessed by Pozzo's cardinal uncle, Harry Wesley sets out to grow a super-fig...
...order known from the Greek as boustrophedon, "as the ox plows." For instance, he says, the five pictures the Genesis author interpreted as 1) the creation of Eve, 2) the description of Man and Woman, 3) the temptation of Eve and the apple-eating, 4) the making of fig-leaf aprons, 5) the confrontation with God, tell quite a different story when considered in reverse order...
First, according to Graves's reading of the Hebron chronicle, comes No. 5-not God discovering a hiding Adam and Eve, but a man named Agenor finding his twin brother Belus making love to a girl named Hebe. The fig-leaf episode (No. 4) is the surprised lovers guiltily covering their nakedness, during which Hebe falls for Agenor, and in No. 3 is advised by the Serpent Death to give Belus an apple from the Serpent's tree. The apple drugs Belus into unconsciousness (No. 2), whereupon Hebe tells Agenor to finish his brother off, which he does...
...this, Stagg remains an active practitioner of the cult of physical fitness. He goes through a routine of bending and stretching exercises on awakening. He does pushaways, knee bends and chinning on an old fig tree in his yard, jogs around a small course that he has laid out from fig to apricot to pear-tree stump (about 100 yards at a time). He cuts his lawn with a hand mower, rakes his own leaves. His blood pressure is 135 over 90. The systolic reading is low for any man over 65; the diastolic is near the upper limit...