Word: formlessness
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Still, says Rusk, we need more "pointless talk" at the highest levels of diplomacy. Out of such seemingly aimless moments come feelings that at first are formless but can change the world some day just as surely as the strongest armies. Something could start this week. Stranger things have happened at lunch in the White House...
...feelings are not entirely formless, either. There are very few historical experiences that the world holds in common. The Olympic Games are one. "A tradition," says George Liveris, president of the Greek Shooting Federation, and once an Olympic participant. "They are the longest lasting social activity that exists." Maybe that accounts for the remarkable success of the American torch relay. On the roads, the cheers for the torchbearers came out sounding like old-fashioned patriotism, but the impulse seemed to go both broader and deeper, to a connection with Greece, with the past, with everyone's past...
Wherein, then, lay the triumph of the march? Civil rights leaders themselves had a hard time putting it into words. "We subpoenaed the conscience of the nation," said Martin Luther King Jr. The march was informal, often formless-yet it somehow had great dignity. It had little of the sustained suspense of an astronaut shoot or a national political convention-but it built, despite moments of boredom and restlessness-to an emotion-draining climax. It was in the probable effects on the conscience of millions of previously indifferent Americans that the march might find its true meaning...
...final point was the commission's most formless and general. But in many ways, it was at the core of the entire report. The intent, said Gardner, was to provoke "whatever is necessary to get the people of this country to think about this problem." Despite some reservations about oversimplification, many educators were pleased. Observed Chester Finn, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University: "The commission's report is a splendid codification of what I've regarded as the conventional wisdom of the past five years. It gives these ideas the kind of respect they...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, in one hour of the Winter Park Art Festival you will see more gorgeous specimens of the opposite sex than in your entire college career to date. It's guaranteed--look on the back of the package. If you can stand close contact with five hundred formless paintings and sculptures, you are in for the artistic experience of your life. Notice the marvelous interplay between form and meaning in those blue eyes in the corner...