Word: idyl
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Idyl and Ordeal. In any case, most Czechoslovaks are waiting uncomfortably for some sort of denouement. In the four months since the invasion, they have seen much of the excitement-and freedom-that was generated during Dubcek's early stewardship wither away under Soviet pressure. When TIME Correspondent Peter Forbath, who covered both the idyl and the ordeal, recently returned to Prague after an absence of two months, he found that the Russian presence was certainly the No. 1 reality in Czechoslovakia. Yet much of the country's mood, he found, remained resilient. For-bath's report...
...that matter, Balthazar's whole life appears predestined to failure. The idyl with his 24-year-old nanny Bella, when he is but twelve, leads to his first sexual experience, the fathering of a never-to-be-seen son, and an agonizing separation. His next amorous adventure, initiated by Beefy when they both turn up at Trinity College in Dublin, is with a poor working-class girl named Breda. For that, he and Beefy are both booted from college. An engagement to wealthy Miss Fitzdare ends in a tragic riding accident. And, trapped into an ugly, upper-class London...
Then the film changes bosses in mid-screen and Will Penny turns standard after all: Civilized Woman Tames Frontier Man. The formula female (prettily played by Joan Hackett) has a formula little boy, and the threesome winsomely provide the formula scenes-the nursing-his-wounds idyl, the making-him-take-a-bath episode, the surrogate father bit. It is an immense relief when Donald Pleasence turns up as the maniac bad guy with an interest in rape and torture...
Permutations. The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike's couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex. Their Puritan gods have retreated to unawesome, half-deserted churches, where beaten clergymen, sizing up the businessman congregations, croak about an improbable Christ who "offers us present security, four-and-a-half percent compounded every quarter." The Biblical woman accused of adultery would be safe in Tarbox; here no stones are thrown, only envious glances. With no heat left in the Protestant American crucible, the comfortable couples of Tarbox have reached out for another kind of warmth...
...politics, poetry, architecture, painting, interior design, cabinetry, fabrics-would be needed to catalogue his achievements. The aim of his life was to restore craftsmanship and beauty to a deprived industrial working class. He was concerned with the deep discrepancy between the dark satanic mills of industrial England and the idyl (real or imagined) of rural life hedged in tradition. It is a discrepancy still known in 20th century America, and it makes Morris' life relevant reading today...