Word: humanity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...published letters are answered at scholarly length in the column. For a reader inquiring about the uses of leisure, Adler paraphrased Aristotle: "Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary, but it does not enrich or ennoble a human life. Leisure, in contrast, consists of all those activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually and spiritually." Asked to define justice, he quoted Justinian-"Render to each his due"-and Mortimer J. Adler-"Treat equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion to their inequality." Occasionally, Adler is stumped by a reader's question...
...stop this tragic cycle, park authorities tried importing four zoo-bred wolves. But they preferred living on human handouts, and had to be sent back to the zoo. Eventually, wild wolves from Canada crossed on the ice. Purdue and Park Service biologists, some of whom have braved the island's fierce and lonely winter to study the working of nature's balance, report that the wolves' system is to cut a single moose out of a herd and keep nipping at him day after day until he weakens. Sometimes it takes a week. In crusted snow that...
Goya, when he tumbled for his ducal doxy, was nearing 50, and totally deaf as the result of a mysterious and paralyzing illness; as an artist, he was a respected court painter to Charles IV, but his searing studies of the agonies of war and the misery of the human condition still lay ahead of him. In the movie (filmed in Rome because the Alba family prevailed on Franco to lock the moviemakers out of Spain), "Paco" Goya is a beardless, hot-blooded youth (Anthony Franciosa) newly arrived in Madrid from the sticks. The duchess (Ava Gardner), a democratic type...
...figurative painter, working with multihued geometric figures of his own invention and picturing them, precisely arranged, on vacuum-cleaned stage sets. His figures seem about to spring into action, like the Tin Woodman of Oz. They could not look more mute; yet they speak of the human condition. Vintage of Uncertainties cruelly evokes the uncertain aspects of motherhood. The Oracle delicately poses a horrendous question: Which is the Oracle? Who is to be believed...
...eldest heals his wounds by charity, tending the displaced persons who occupy the castle. The second heals himself by husbandry, tending the displaced soil and its peasants. But the third brother, Amadeus, finds no panacea to hand. Years in a concentration camp have killed his trust in human beings. War and revolution have so sapped his faith in the earth itself that he can only sigh skeptically when a cheerful clergyman assures him that healing "always begins with the hands . . . Our Heavenly Father looks after the heart." But Amadeus seeks regeneration of a profounder sort, because he sees deeper...