Word: idea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Every country is not only a country but also an idea. The idea of China has haunted-and usually eluded-the Western mind ever since travelers set out to find the dream of golden-roofed Cathay. In the Renaissance, Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reported on China under the Ming dynasty, praised the country's "orderly management of the entire realm." In the Age of Reason, Leibniz suggested that what Europe needed was Chinese missionaries to teach "goodness." In the Victorian era, the U.S. Protestant missionary Arthur H. Smith was shocked by China's "indifference to suffering...
...blending all manner of faiths, Taoism managed to coexist with Confucianism over the centuries. A Chinese in power, it has been said, is a Confucian: out of power, he is a Taoist, and when about to die, a Buddhist. China absorbed Buddhism, too; in China, somehow, the evanescent idea of nirvana became transmuted into a far earthier notion...
...lack of analytic thinking helps explain the almost magical power individual words seem to have. In his concept of cheng ming, "the rectification of names," Confucius pointed out that names and terminology must be correct, otherwise "the people do not know to move hand or foot." This idea, suggest Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank in a joint book on Asia, really means not so much that theory should correspond to reality, but "that reality should be made to conform with theory." Similarly, the problem of appearance is involved in the concept of face. Partly, face is a preference of form...
...sees the greatest promise in industrial clothing such as lab coats and coveralls. Inman Cook, who is preparing to open a store called Paperworks in Manhattan, thinks home furnishings are the likeliest area, plans to offer paper curtains, drapes and sheets. Sterling Paper believes in paper resort wear, the idea being that vacationers could buy paper clothes at the hotel when they arrive, throw them away when they depart, thus eliminating packing and carrying heavy luggage. It is also testing a man's $12 suit...
Hamp, by John Wilson. The idea of trial is one of the touchstones of drama. In some sense, Oedipus and Antigone, Hamlet and Macbeth are all on trial for their lives and are tested by the ordeal of life. Hamp is not even remotely a protagonist on this grand tragic scale: a World War I private from the British North Country, he has deserted in battle and is to stand court-martial. But in catching a mirror image of existence in the features of a frightened boy, Playwright Wilson raises questions that have disturbed and puzzled men since war began...