Word: kahlil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grip of a memorial epidemic. The success of the Viet Nam Memorial has spawned demand for more. Memorials are in progress to Korean War vets, to black Revolutionary War patriots, to women in military service, to law-enforcement heroes, to women in Viet Nam, to Francis Scott Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that, having just now transcended paper and entered the radically ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving pastless present...
...children of the electronic age, however, suffer differently. Forgetting is all we do. We so feel ourselves forgetting that we contrive monuments of stone -- to vets, to cops, to Kahlil Gibran, to whomever -- to anchor ourselves in time. That which is written in stone endures, we figure. If the Ten Commandments were given today, they would be flashed on the great Diamond Vision screen at Yankee Stadium, and by sunup not a soul would remember...
...seriously but not solemnly; it massages them rather than pointing a finger. Elliot may apostrophize in soppy cliches about his infatuation ("What passion today with Lee! She was like a volcano!"), but he is canny enough to woo Lee with love poems by E.E. Cummings, the thinking man's Kahlil Gibran. Mickey's belief that he has a brain tumor may lead him on quests for ultimate answers, but to him Catholicism is all Wonder bread and moving-eye portraits of Jesus. The prospect of reincarnation is just as spooky. "Great," he sulks. "That means I'll have...
...Kahlil Gibran...
...vows concocted for those weddings seem period pieces now. They were oppressively poetic, gushily confessional. They were sweet and intimate and profound and occasionally metaphysical, like a Hallmark card. They were illuminated by moonbeams of Kahlil Gibran ("Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone") and drenched with fragrances of Rod McKuen. At one wedding of the time, the bridegroom rhapsodized: "It is therefore our glorious and divine purpose to fly mountains, to sow petalscent. . . to glorify glory, to love with love." His bride answered: "We hereby commit ourselves to a serenity more...