Word: gibbon
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Francis Parkman on LaSalle and his discovery of the Mississippi, "rolling like a destiny." Jacob Burckhardt on the civilization of the Rennaissance in Italy, which Clive, smiling, called "history for adults." Gibbon, and his cool-headed appraisal of the human excesses of Christianity. It was a fabulous semester, straightforward and absorbing...
...curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night. Among his favorites...
...enormous curiosity and awe. The Old Testament exclamation "How are the mighty fallen!" was only one of the earliest recorded responses to the spinning wheel of fortune. Ever since, the rubble of old realms has teased and provoked imaginations. In the 18th century, a visit to Rome inspired Gibbon to write an enduring history of imperial decline. Romantic poets found the gloom and doom of antiquity irresistible. Envisioning an ancient toppled monument in a barren desert, Shelley conceived an epitaph that was both ironic and admonitory: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty...
History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of crimes, sorrows and misfortunes." It is, equally often, a study in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy. Sometimes history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the folly of blindness or greed or lust. But history is rarely a fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires. Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide in perfect symmetry...
...first of these is the Unwilling Academic, a bespectacled, goat-voiced man in his 30s who has spent the last nine years of his life in Namibia cheerfully studying gibbon dung. As is evident in his shaking hands and uncertain style, only the twin prospects of starvation and separation from his beloved droppings has forced him onto the stage...