Word: instinctiveness
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...graffito distressed the cathedral's Dean, the Very Rev. Edward Patey, a clergyman known for his social conscience, but he defended the project forthrightly. "It might be called wasted space, wasted heat, by some," he says today, "but there is an instinct that one aspect of worship of God is to be aware of our smallness in proportion to his majesty. The medieval builders felt this. To go to worship God is not just like going out to buy a packet of fish and chips." As for the cost, Dean Patey has no apologies: "Compared with what people spend...
...After Stalin's death in 1953, he allied himself with Nikita Khrushchev, eventually serving as one of the party chiefs Deputy Premiers. During the Cuban missile crisis it was Mikoyan whom Khrushchev sent to Fidel Castro to explain his "compromise" with President Kennedy. A survivor by instinct, Mikoyan initiated the now famous attack against Stalin at the party's 20th Congress in 1956 and, eight years later, helped depose Khrushchev. Eased out of office at age 70, Mikoyan enjoyed an honorable retirement...
Everyone except the abnormally saintly or submissive possesses the retaliatory instinct. It lurks like a small black gland at the base of the brain, in the mind's nonreasoning regions. When a person's elemental sense of justice is offended, the retributive instinct flares and hops in outrage; it gesticulates like Mussolini; it demands satisfaction. The urge is deep and primitive. Some cannibals on Pacific islands used to eat convicted murderers for dinner-a practice that appeased both their hunger for food and their thirst for justice...
Only in the somber final chapters, through Gethsemane and the Crucifixion, does McCowen abandon these shadings for an almost severely straightforward manner. With a sure instinct, he realizes that here a minimum of effects will achieve the greatest effect...
...some of which, as a confirmed goy, I could not comprehend--a Jewish pride, and yet he remains a universal character. To Levine, as to Halberstam, ethnicity and personal background are important parts of life, and learning to cope with them--when to use them as a form of instinct, and (more important) when to ignore them--is the key to personal growth...