Word: helpful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...letter to the Office of Student Placement earlier this year, Ravndal stressed that the Foreign Service "cannot help but be interested in Harvard men for the simple reason that there are so many of them among...
...part in World War I, falls passionately in love with Marthe Grangier (Micheline Presle). The devil in François' flesh is more than adolescent sex; it is also a blind adolescent ego, full of the power to hurt. Half-man and half-child, François mockingly helps Marthe select the furniture for the home she is to share with her husband, who is fighting at the front. Then he moves in to help her use it. When Marthe refuses to continue writing to her husband, François, though tormented by jealousy, insists on dictating her weekly...
...help to define a word, the word culture ... to rescue this word is the extreme of my ambition." So says Poet-Critic Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1948 Nobel Prizewinner, in the opening pages of his new book. But the reader who thinks this modest pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land...
This view, says Eliot, is not much help to culture. Hand-picked "elites" (who is going to pick them? he asks) inevitably become specialists-one-track groups who only get together "like committees." Even if they could be chosen and made to shake down together, how would they carry out the important duty of passing on their cultural values to a succeeding generation...
...concludes Eliot, is for "the great majority of human beings [to] go on living in the place in which they were born." Regional habits, dialects, loyalties, eccentricities and faiths all contribute to a national culture by ensuring vital "friction between its parts." In the same way, different national cultures help towards the unity of international culture; men of good will who dream of nothing but ideological and international unanimity are, Eliot warns, culture's worst enemies. In the Eliotian western world, Catholic must continue to debate with Protestant, theist with atheist, class with class, creating a "Christendom . . . within [whose...