Word: idyl
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Douglass' Baltimore idyl came to an end. He was sent back to rural Maryland and farmed out to a cracker named Edward Covey, who enjoyed a reputation as a "nigger breaker." Covey very nearly broke Douglass. Called "the Snake" because he was always sneaking up on the slaves at work, Covey ruled by terror. "My natural elasticity was crushed," writes Douglass, "the disposition to read departed, the dark night of slavery closed in upon me." But Covey flogged Douglass once too often. In a fit of rage, Douglass grabbed Covey by the neck and beat him up. Covey never...
...this childhood idyl comes to a tragic end. A last desperate band of Germans, fleeing before the Allied advance, pass by the villa. Pushing the girls aside, the Germans execute their Jewish uncle's family. Returning to find his family dead and his villa in flames, Uncle Wilhelm shoots himself. Innocence has seldom had a more brutal death...
...somehow the idyl ended. Reynolds preferred to spend most of his time on Sapelo Island, with its two tennis courts, two swimming pools and its airstrip. There, Muriel's only real companion was Buck Rabbit, whose disposition had been considered none too amiable even before he came down with pulmonary emphysema (a serious lung disease...
...seems simultaneously intended as a romantic idyl, a secret thrill for naughty little boys of all ages, a modern myth of the mother goddess. The myth declares itself in symbols too insistent-the child is flatly called by the name of the goddess herself; her lover brings her a weathercock, bird of Apollo, god of light; and at the end an evergreen, tree of Dionysus, god of darkness, stands above his corpse...
Furthermore, the idyl and the peepshow are grossly incompatible. Director Bourguignon does not seem to understand that what is infantile is not necessarily childlike and certainly not charming...