Word: greco-roman
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...unfriendliness. And this building is not unfriendly at all. Le Corbusier's architecture is based on his own Modular System, a geometric proportion to the human figure, i.e. sixfoot man with hand upraised. In using this system of measurement his work is a derivitive of some of the best Greco-Roman and Renaissance architect-humanists who based their architecture on the proportions of the human figure as well. With their own module, the golden section, they designed such visually beautiful buildings as the Colliseum and the Parthenon. Are these harsh and raw? Le Corbusier does use new materials...
Every eschatology, Brandon concludes, is an effort by man to provide himself with "spiritual security" against the passage of time. Unlike the lower animals, which live only in the present moment, man is conscious of time, and thus of death. Stoicism and Epicureanism-faiths for the Greco-Roman intellectual elite-accepted death as the final end to life with equanimity. But man generally has rebelled against this kind of blunt pragmatism, instinctively seeking "some state in which he will be secure from the everlasting menace of time's destructive logic." Brandon tacitly admits that he has some trouble juggling...
...troll-eyed German high school teacher, Spengler looked at history not as a linear series of events but as the organic flowering and dying of eight major cultures: ancient Egyptian, ancient Semitic, Peruvian, Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Greco-Roman and Western. All had flourished for the same amount of time (about 1,000 years). All showed the same development. By comparing the dead to the living, the historian could tick off the inevitable signs of decay and predict how death would come again...
Inspired Guess. Thus Spengler proposes that the music of Mozart and "the glad fairyland of Moorish columns that seem to melt in air'' are contemporary because they express the golden flowering of two comparable cultures (Western and Middle Eastern). In Western culture (which Spengler regards as entirely separate from Greco-Roman), Cecil John Rhodes's campaign to exploit Africa is made equivalent to Caesar's foray into Gaul. Both mark the start of expansionist drives that Spengter sees as the beginning of the culture's final decline...
...bachelor named Frank Blanchard, who, though college-educated, wouldn't take New York if you renamed Sixth Avenue for him. And for good reason: he lives on a houseboat, makes a dandy income manufacturing Sno-Fuzz machines (Sno-Fuzz is a kiddy confection), and practices a kind of Greco-Roman wrestling with any number of ladies. In fallow periods he daydreams of Ava Gardner-a whimsy not among the author's bubbliest...