Word: free
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...common element in the Harvard community contemptuously dismisses the pinball machine as puerile idleness. But nothing could be further from the truth: the pinball machine is a metaphysical microcosm. It reflects, in miniature, the unchanging processes, the limitations which define man's Free Will as well as his victimization by circumstance. First of all, it demonstrates Necessity; there is a magnet, ever drawing the ball downward to let it finally rest in its groove, until it is again called upon to begin its course anew. There is Free Will when the movement of the ball fortuitously heads toward...
...there are tragedies. The machine will tilt and all further free Will must be forfeited, when a player does not play the game properly, when he attempts to overleap the limitations set upon him, strikes too hard and upsets the balance of things...
...good players have their reward-free games to those who reverence the machine and will not tilt, who use the flippers at the right time and the right place. When the final score is all added up in the end, the machine, with its unfailing precision, indicates how many more games can be played without the insertion of a nickel...
Musical comedys, like vacations, were better before the war. They were a let more amoral and meaningless and thus unencumbered, they were free to be musical and comic...
...Senators sat up and took notice; Airman Rickenbacker made the businesslike kind of sense they wanted to hear. Next day, he followed up his free advice with a dramatic and not entirely disinterested proposal. He offered to take over his competitors-National, Delta, Capital, Chicago & Southern, and Colonial Airlines -and handle all their domestic air mail at Eastern's "non-subsidy" rate of 60/ to 65^ per ton mile (v. the five lines' average which he figured at $4.45 last year). *The difference, said Rick, would save the taxpayers $10 million a year...