Word: idealize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deny some students intellectual excitement and emotional aid, and deny all of them a voice in shaping their experience here. Most people come here believing that Harvard's spell of greatness is genuine. The bitterness, alienation or resignation of many students measures their belief in that ideal. It is growing ever harder to believe that exposing flaws in this University or any other institution will prod people to consider changing them. And Harvard is doing its part to convince students that its "real world" is the only one. But I am stubborn, and grateful for it. I am not resigned...
...rational ideal had scarcely been erected before dismantling began. Schorske describes this process as both a siege and a mutiny. Disaffected peasants, artisans and Slavs, among others, began massing politically, demanding certainties and absolutes. Taking to the streets, they cared nothing for the hallowed liberal creed: "Wissen macht frei" (Knowledge makes us free). Poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal saw what was happening: "Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow." All too soon Wissen macht frei was degraded into the cruelly deceptive slogan of Nazi death camps: Arbeit [work] macht frei...
Those elbows have taught a lesson or two. Admittedly, a fine line exists between legitimate use and violent abuse of the physical in professional hockey. Howe, however, most nearly approaches hockey's elusive ideal of toughness without violence. His retaliatory elbows, legendary for their subtlety, are vicious but not malicious...
Just as good earth and climate around Epernay, France, provide nature's ideal spot for nurturing champagne grapes, the Midwest's long growing season, heavy spring or summer rains and rich, two-foot-deep topsoil are perfect for grain cultivation. Kansas and Oklahoma are wheat country. Just north in the hardy soil of Illinois and Iowa lie the great corn belt and vast fields of soybeans. Farther north, in the Dakotas and Minnesota, grow wheat, soybeans, sugar beets. Here is the richest farm land east of Eden, where the biblical seven years of bountiful harvests are usually followed...
Tynan is best when he unreservedly gives his heart away, and Louise Brooks is his ideal recipient. He visits the actress, now seventyish and living in a small Rochester apartment; he finds her arthritic and surrounded by volumes of literary classics. "Most beautiful-but-dumb girls think they are smart, and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter," she tells him. Smitten with images of Louise's dark, gamy sexuality in such films as Pandora's Box and Prix de Beaute, Tynan is now thoroughly captivated by the frail star...