Word: graven
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...possible consequences. His energy and imagination have been aroused most keenly by doubt, the sense that every act, individual and civic, leads perilously into the unknown. Looking backward is not the job such a mind performs best, as Ancient Evenings proves. The book is a gesture of obeisance to graven images and an abstract ideal, dutifully performed by an inherently disruptive spirit...
Such greasepaint and graven images are verboten in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's temple of the pure genius: "However much we search the reservoir of our imagination for an image whereby Mozart became real to us, we find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author...
...worm who would be god: "Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat." Some of Leto's decrees are variations on the Old Testament. Dune's religion, for example, outlaws computers as graven im ages of the mind. Throughout, his observations toll a somber truth: "Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies...
...model's complex logic is exhilarating, but a Catch-22 struck hard. The ease of substitution parameter does not represent a behavioral assumption to guide projections; it is not a figure graven in stone, but an empirical result determined from historical data. Projecting the ease of substitution trend into the future is guesswork--nothing more, nothing less. Depending on the figure chosen, the model could predict either economic disaster or conservation harmlessly reducing national energy needs...