Word: level
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Termite Level. "They are laughing at you," sniffed the senior Maeterlinck when Maurice's first mystical writings found their way into print. "Some of my acquaintances did not recognize me," recalled Maurice, "while my friends gave me their hands with an air of pity." Bitter and hurt, he left his native land and went to Paris. There he soon found kinder friends, produced the brooding, mystical plays and essays (Les Aveugles, Pelléas et Mélisande, The Life of the Bee) which made his fame worldwide. Critics praised him. He won the Nobel Prize...
Death and decay loomed large in Maeterlinck's works. "Everywhere," wrote a critic, "Maeterlinck discerned signs of an inevitable decadence of the human race . . . According to him, 2,000 years hence human relations will have declined to the level of life in a termite colony." The insects whose lives he studied for years seemed better off than people. "The ant is far less unhappy," wrote Maeterlinck, "than the very happiest...
...Britons have been told that they had rounded the corner to economic recovery. Time & again, they have found that just around the corner was another crisis. In the face of each new crisis, Britons worked harder than ever before; industrial production boomed to 40% above the prewar level. But Britain was finding it increasingly hard to get dollars in exchange for its sweat and toil...
...latest Sky and Telescope magazine described a great meteor crater recently identified at Wolf Creek in the dry wilderness 400 miles inland from Broome, Western Australia. From ground level the crater is not impressive. Its rim looks like a low, rocky ridge above a featureless plain. Apparently the few who have passed near it hardly ever gave it a second glance...
When a top level Harvard committee admits the University may have made a mistake, it's a good idea to watch what happens next. Last week, the Committee on Educational Policy made such an admission indirectly, when it set up Donald C. McKay's special committee on Geography. No one can predict what this group will suggest, nor what will happen to its recommendations, but it's a pretty good bet that something will be done to patch up last year's hasty hatcheting of a vital field...