Word: heffalump
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...General Assembly of the United Nations. In real life, of course, he could do so and no one would notice, but West ignores this for the sake of his artifice. The resulting episode is thus one of the neatest bits of whimsical invention since A.A. Milne created the heffalump...
...Milne's classic, Piglet was left virtually speechless by his run-in with what he thought was the mysterious Heffalump. Now astronomers can share his bafflement as they grope for words to describe their own strange encounter. Off in the distant heavens, among a grouping of stars that the ancients called Cygnus (the Swan), they seem to have found a celestial version of a Heffalump. It is a cosmic beast of such enormous gravity that it appears to be tugging, stretching and, indeed, slowly gobbling up its giant companion, a massive star more than 20 times the size...
...harnessing of the atom to flights across the solar system, the thought of matter going down a kind of cosmic drain stretches the mind. It is totally at odds with common sense and, a cynic might say, smacks slightly of selfdelusion, if not madness. After all, the frightful Heffalump turned out to be only Pooh with his head stuck in a jar of honey...
...doubts about their very existence linger. But the current intellectual ferment about them transcends the importance of both their reality and practicality. Just by thinking on such a grand scale, humanity not only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet's Heffalump but Browning's famous declamation: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for." To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision is the ultimate lodestar...
...written a book. This is the age of dreadful domestic disclosure (Elliott Roosevelt nipping at Eleanor in the guise of historian; Nigel Nicolson vicariously reveling in the vagaries of V. Sackville-West). A friend of Pooh therefore at first approaches Enchanted Places the way Piglet crept up on the Heffalump trap: full of horrible fascination but ready to run for his life...