Word: labyrinth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways and hedges, which represent bureaucracy. While an amused keeper watches with his vicious dog, they crawl piteously about, toss out the bones of their dead comrades and conduct absurd conversations...
...Borges, the universe is, as he said at a reading of his poetry in December, "an unstable world of the mind, an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream." Borges sees himself, the artist, not as a searcher for the exit to the labyrinth but as a man lost along with everyone else, who can perceive and can convey to his fellows flashes of clarity within the windings of the maze. The flashes of clarity within the windings of the maze. The essence of the lectures--especially the two most recent--is the expansion of such insights...
Maneuvering the bill toward Senate passage through an obstacle course of conservative opposition and a labyrinth of parliamentary rules was a Clausewitzian tactical feat executed by a most improbable general-Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. Long opposed to open-housing legislation, Dirksen lately reversed his field and joined up with the Republican-Democratic liberal coalition (TIME, March...
...Borges exclaims, "I never thought of that" (a remarkable reaction from a man who seems to have thought of more than anyone else) and goes on to speculate on why verse is somehow sadder than a prose treatment of the same subject, and on what the opposite of a labyrinth (Borges' central metaphor) is. "Borges and Us" is a marked improvement over the days when Island editors asked Mary Poppins' creator, in issue number two, "First of all, Miss Travers, where were you born...
...Lownds, 47, the mustachioed commander of the 26th Marine Regiment, who oversees the defense of the base from an underground bunker left over by its original French occupants. Sitting in a faded lawn chair, he seldom rests, night or day. He keeps constant watch over the nerve center, a labyrinth of whitewashed rooms lit by bare bulbs and bustling with staff officers and enlisted aides. Is he worried about the huge enemy concentration surrounding him? "Hell, no," says Lownds. "I've got Marines. My confidence isn't shaken a bit." He fully recognizes his stand-and-fight mission...