Word: flowered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Indians spun out to gather wild celery and Indian rhubarb, came home for feasts of delicate herring eggs (cooked in seal oil, garnished with soy sauce). Spring yawned in the lower valleys, and out popped the arctic poppy, shooting star, lupine and forget-me-not (Alaska's official flower). And now, after a long winter's self-imposed confinement, out lumbered the great Alaskan bears-and with them the sudden sparkle of high military brass from Washington, who, it just so happens, favor the bear season as the best time for Alaskan inspection trips...
...Blooms that flower in the spring publishing season have everything to do with this case. The first of the species, planted by James Joyce, was Leopold Bloom, the Dublin space salesman who flourished in Ulysses. Because of the things that went on inside Bloom's head, writing has not been quite the same again; since he had his big, long, exhausting day, something called the interior monologue has rattled around inside many an emptier head. The latest victim of the idea that anything and everything goes, especially on paper, is an American named James Patrick Donleavy, whose cross-pollination...
...horror of the "enormous rabbit" in Race of Life and the rabbits in The Last Flower stems from this inversion of the rabbit's traditional role in nature. In the first case, the rabbit is out of proportion, as is man's fear of sex. The denial of sex checks the emotions and inverts the flow of nature (as seen in rabbits and dogs), therefore creates an enormous (hence inverted) rabbit as symbol of this fear. Dogs could not serve the same symbolic purpose, for they are closely linked to man and have picked up some of man's vices...
Also, Thurber needs them in The Last Flower to play off against the rabbits--now normal in size, but fierce, not meek. Note the sequence: war ends; the dogs, symbols of normalcy, abandon man; fierce rabbits descend; with time, natural conditions resume; children chase away the rabbits; the dogs return to man. Nature at the start was inverted both by war and the denial of sex. The rabbits can be viewed as the scourge of the gods (or of nature) after war, and one might add that the "enormous rabbit" itself could be America's fear of warfare...
...Persian Versailles, was too grandiose for thoughts of sex, its great stairway "making one feel as insignificant in the face of time as the humble lizard that darts to hide in the crevices of that cyclopaean wall." The storied gardens of Shiraz were a disappointment, but the taxis were flower-decked, and Author Sitwell caught a nocturnal glimpse of the annual migration of the Gashgai tribe, 400,000 men, women and children moving 7,000,000 head of cattle to summer pasture 15,000 ft. above sea level. Jerusalem's Mosque of Omar was "more beautiful than St. Mark...