Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...roots. At most times it is so firmly embedded in one tradition that the other cannot even be understood. Thus the Middle Ages Christianized Aristotle, while the modern age has secularized Jesus. In certain eras, the dominant viewpoint is no longer adequate for coping with reality, and men again grasp the full meaning of the alternative, thereby creating a mysterious Rennaissance. Thus the Alexandrine world was converted to Christianity; thus the Middle Ages were converted to Hellenism; thus the modern Alexandria will be converted once again to Christianity...
...Americans . . . Not for one moment did he realise what this meant to me. He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance." Perhaps in a larger context than Brookie could grasp...
Stonewall was no superman. He stumbled into an ambush at Kernstown, and his failure to press home the attack during the Seven Days' Battles has never been satisfactorily explained. But he resembled U.S. Grant in his habitual willingness to fight, and Napoleon in his instant grasp of the weakness of an enemy position. His own officers were infuriated by his secrecy, often knowing as little of his plans as did the foe. Occasionally this habit cost him a victory. More often it resulted in stunning surprises, as at Chancellorsville when his entire force suddenly appeared in the enemy rear...
...Pencil King" is diffuse in a different way. Her sensibility to experience is abnormal. This is the beginning of any art, but is also the beginning of madness. She does not make the usual associations, or think in the hackneyed categories, which means that she has it within her grasp to extend the reader's sensibility to a new pattern of perceptions...
...stay. Fending off a swarm of taxi drivers, the Durrells met their own personal "Zorba the Greek" when a swarthy islander named Spiro shouted to the beleaguered family, "Hoy! Whys donts you have someones who can talks your own language?" Neither Spiro nor the local hotel guide could quite grasp certain Anglo-Saxon eccentricities ("But Madame, what for you want a bathroom? Have you not got the sea?"). The Durrells were soon ensconced in a strawberry-pink hillside villa (the first of three), and after they began breakfasting under tangerine trees, bathing from crescent-shaped beaches that looked "like fallen...