Word: firmament
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Nonetheless, the architects endowed Harvard with a veritable firmament of bannisters. At the top of the list is Sever Hall, already renowned for another architectural idiosyncrasy--the whispering arch. The glorious wooden bannisters in Sever's concourse are the slickest and longest at Harvard, and any student sophomoric enough to slide down between classes will surely make a bang, even if he or she doesn't crash through the glass doors. Matthews Hall and the Science Center have challenging and steep bannisters that should test the mettle of any slider who looks over the edge to the chasm below...
PHILIP SCHORSH, son of a German tycoon, hippie-radical, deportee from the United States, Harvard Business School student, and cause celebre, was one of the more bizarre luminaries in the Harvard firmament a couple of years back. A doctoral candidate given the boot for not even beginning his thesis, Schorsh struck back by claiming to be writing a thesis on what was wrong with the Harvard Business School...
...GUESS Vladimir Mayakovsky probably had something on the ball. Born in 1893, he joined the Bolsheviks at the age of 14, became a Futurist poet, and then the brightest star in the Soviet poetic firmament for a decade or so after 1917. He evidently had mixed feelings about this. "I'm fed to the teeth with agit-prop," he remarked in a poem published about three weeks before his suicide in 1930. More important, he apparently had his doubts about whether the Soviet state was still worth writing agit-prop about. After his suicide Stalin announced he was the greatest...
Describing the action for future cameramen, Collier creates prose that often matches and sometimes surpasses even Milton's great-ranging visual imagination. He sees the fall of the rebel angels at cosmic distance, as a golden snowfall that fills the firmament. After Pandemonium (the house of all demons) is created by magic, its central room becomes as black as night, or the inside of Satan's skull, and myriad rows of attendant devils wink like stars. Satan and his dark disciples fly toward the high gate of hell bound for the corruption of mankind. They look, Collier writes...
...receded even more of late, so that its horizon lies somewhere between the Satanic landscape of industrial New Jersey and the now-conceivable universe above. Driving north towards New York, immense planes climbing upwards, the sky pallid, purulent, and ablaze, I realize that "Christ's blood streams in the firmament" no longer, nor, in truth, is there even a firmament at all. Like our human possibilities, the heavens have been obscured...