Word: idyll
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...idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C. was killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford. Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from the ceiling. Says Wyeth: "It was really...
...deeper reason for the steady decline of idyls, though, may be that travelers love to report that paradise is lost. If it is the first secret conceit of every voyager to imagine that he alone has found the world's last paradise, it is the second to believe that the door has slammed shut right behind him. A paradise is by its nature a fine and private place, a deserted island or a solitary glade; Adam and Eve would have seemed considerably less charmed had they been surrounded by squawking kids, knickknack vendors and a row of time-share condos...
...during the war and postwar years when he lived in Washington and New York as a young diplomat. He remembers the actors' names and gives running commentaries on their performances and backgrounds. It is almost as though the Soviet- American alliance was the high point of his life, the idyl he seeks to recapture through his dealings with Americans. When Gromyko critiqued our article, the iciest days of the cold war were behind us, but his observations on the necessity and the possibility of restoring good if not truly friendly relations with the U.S. went well beyond the official Soviet...
...Grenada, election day 1984 dawned as a tropical idyl: clear skies and sunshine, with brief spells of rain to break the sultry Caribbean heat. The splendid morning weather helped make a large turnout seem as inevitable as the arrival of the winter cruise ships in St. George's, the capital. At churches, schools and even discotheques, 85% of the island's 48,000 voters lined up for their first free elections since 1976. The balloting was described by an observer from the Organization of American States as "flawless." So, from the point of view of the Reagan Administration...
Tommy, the boy involved, is, like all children, subject to the imponderable whims of the godlike creatures known as adults. In 1939, the year of America's last idyl, friends and family play out their lives in the Midwestern mill town, impervious to the Great Depression and the war that has already begun a world away. Here Tommy's parents lay down draconian laws, then act with well-meaning hypocrisy. The word Negro is never mentioned in the presence of a black steward because "the condition it described was thought to be embarrassing at best and irreversible...