Word: hermitting
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Says Ebensten: "The tattooist is almost a fairy-tale figure, hovering in his gloomy, weirdly decorated and mysterious little shop like some grotesque but bewitching hermit ..." But since World War I, tattooing has steadily declined. It is too conservative, for one thing, holding to such dull, outmoded motifs as Mickey Mouse, foul anchors, and bathing belles of yesteryear. Ebensten laments: "No atom bomb explodes on any lusty chest...
...once, in a moment of exuberance, he cried : 'I have no secrets from you, Massa Baker!' And in a letter he wrote after I left, he said : 'You came to Innsbruck to extract by pickax a few timid and grudging facts from a fretful hermit, and what you got was Niagara from the Ancient Mariner.' He exhorted me to become a headmaster some day - which, coming from a teacher like himself, I took to be a compliment. He remembered Barton warmly, but as far as I remember had no recommendation for his becoming a headmaster- field...
...Bryan's summation: "Since man is a social creature, he must expect risks in social contact, even in petting parties. The only alternative is to become a hermit or a bore. Kissing can be not only a pleasant but a harmless pastime if ordinary lip and mouth hygiene is practiced." But Dr. Bryan still refuses a flat answer to the original question. If the partner happens to be in the early stages of a serious infection (such as strep throat), a kiss can still be dangerous. It involves a calculated risk...
...philosophy and life. He settled for some years into a brilliant reign as a dissenting and discursive professor of philosophy at Harvard, but after 1912 he migrated once more, this time to France and Spain, then England and finally Italy, where, internationally famous, he was venerated as a melodious hermit and a beguiling sage...
...mystical authority came out in it; nothing could be less congenial to Western thought. Subjective philosophy, intuition, essence, had so thoroughly "gone out" that, while the sweep of Santayana's mind was admired, he seemed to be saying nothing seizable. His true role lay in being a civilized hermit on the adjacent hill, the sage apart, the skeptical psychologist. Loneliness and ecstasy were the distinctly nonmodern desires he recommended to Boston and the world...