Word: idols
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Best Remembered. She was not a failure in Europe. Starting in the 1880s, she spent nearly all her time abroad, ostensibly for her husband's health (he was a neurasthenic). Her idol was Henry James, and of the famous people she met, he is the one she remembered best -the one with whom, as James put it, she was "more and more never apart." Intentionally or not, she makes him out to be a buffoon. He was so convinced of his own poverty, she recalls, that when guests visited him at his home outside London, "the dreary pudding...
...odds-on favorite in Oregon, was still in Saigon, presiding over U.S. efforts to win the war there, consulting with visiting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, taking time for a dip in the pool at the Saigon Sports Club, and staying as silent as any Buddhist idol about his political plans...
...worldly, affable, and possesses a neat, aphoristic wit. Sample: "There are two sorts of people: those who try to make their own fortune and those who make the fortunes of others." But in loyally serving De Gaulle's political fortune, Pompidou is no mirror-image of his idol; he is both more artistically inclined and more frivolous...
Eternal Luster. In a devout send-off for the idol of Avalokiteshvara, Lord of Compassion (see opposite page), Nepalese monks sprinkled it with holy vermilion powder and packed it in flowers before sending it off to New York. The cast bronze has swelling contours that are not obscured by excessive ornamentation, with as much easy stylization and graceful gesture as the sculpted saints of the contemporary Gothic in Europe. Avalokiteshvara has one advantage to delight a sculptor: he comes in 108 different incarnations. Nepalese sculptors were equally adept at hammering out fully rounded copper-gilt figures from inside. Fond...
...Borges, human life is pathetically ephemeral and yet immortal, because each individual bears witness to a precise set of perceptions that cannot be duplicated. When the last unknown Saxon died, writes Borges, there died with him the "face of Woden, the old dread and exultation, the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners...