Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once the hatches of the lunar modules were opened, all that changed. Out in the dunes of the moon, the Apollo astronauts behaved like nothing more--and nothing less--than human beings. They toddled around; they fell down; they got dirty; they kept house. They knew the whole world knew they were there, yet they nonetheless made it a point to leave behind small or sweet or poignant things to mark their brief passing. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, wrote his daughter's initials in the soil with his finger; Charlie Duke, lunar-module pilot of Apollo 16, left...
...last week when Thor Axel Kappfjell, 32, known by the oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff's face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world...
...World Trade Center. (The unlawful leap irritated New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and for that alone was deemed worthwhile by the citizens.) People seem to take pleasure in BASE jumping in the same way, I suppose, that Romans liked watching gladiators. The potential opportunity to observe a fellow human die at a moment of wild exhilaration, or live through such a moment, brings one back to a kind of basics...
...into their brains and hopes they are never tempted, no matter how much money is waved under their noses, to make The Return of Howard the Duck. "This place," says Mike Hoffman, a 1984 fellow whose recent directing credits include A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is a celebration of human subtlety against the glaring cultural vulgarity...
...many of us, moderation even goes against human nature. Extreme case: a rancher friend of mine in West Texas, to whom I offered a beer at lunch, declined it, remarking philosophically, "You know, Lay-yance, I never have been able to understand one beer. If you drink one, you want to drink a case or two. And we don't have time for that today...