Word: heroically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that what they were coming to see would be different from the normal homecomings. The 82 Americans who had been in North Korea's prisons for about a year were returning. Men at the base had worked hard, all night, to give Miramar the red-carpet trappings of a heroic celebration. The crewmen's families were flown to San Diego and "Welcome Home" signs were up everywhere. But beneath the frenetic preparations was the sobering realization that there was something inglorious about the men's return...
...never dreamed of such a thing. Rarely has an artist ever worked with less thought of teaching posterity. He considered himself not an artist, but an artisan, no more elevated in stature than a cabinetmaker with his tools and wood. This was before the Romantic era introduced a more heroic, self-indulgent conception of the artist; still, even some of Bach's contemporaries were afflicted with careerism and flashes of temperament. Bach, throughout his life, merely tried to do an honest job. "I was obliged to be industrious," he said. "Whoever is equally industrious will succeed just equally well...
...depicted a mammoth hunt on their cavern walls. The ingenious killing of beasts larger and more powerful was, after all, the central achievement in man's ascendancy over other forms of life. But the hunt seems early to have been less of a search for food than a heroic confrontation between man and beast, and a sport worthy of kings. Charlemagne, for instance, reportedly acquired the superlative in his name only after engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an enormous bear and, of course, winning...
Sebastian Dangerfield, the lusting, heroic anti-hero of Don-leavy's comic first novel, The Ginger Man, was torn between fumbling seductions and desperate attempts to make ends meet. Balthazar B gropes endlessly for an enduring love, denied him at least partly because of his riches. He is born of wealthy French parents, and the circumstances connected with Balthazar's upbringing make him into a shy, porcelain personality curiously inept at coming to terms with life...
Certainly this exercise has value. History contains a rich catalogue of loser statements, whose authors can be ranked according to the sportsmanship code and assigned appropriate moral victories. Even so, the loser himself well knows that he remains a loser; only by heroic mental gyrations can the also-ran restage the race in his favor. Obviously, triumph and defeat are defined by society rather than the individual. If a Ted Williams bats .400, for instance, the grandstand regards a .300 batter as a loser?and so does...