Word: like
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Like almost all its predecessors, Two Worlds assembles the members of a family in an English country house around the turn of the century and sets them to betraying to one another their inexhaustible human capacity for loyalty and treachery, frankness and cant, courage and cowardice. Its theme, painfully learned by all concerned, is the old, grim and simple text: "Judge not, that ye be not judged...
Readers will find here, gleaming oddly in its transplanted setting, the pattern of the classical Greek drama which was Author Compton-Burnett's favorite reading as a child. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, struggling to gauge the future and discovering that it twists horribly back into his own past, the characters in Two Worlds march blindly to their fate, doomed from the start but always demanding, with the eloquence and dignity of Aeschylean heroes, their right to respect as well as humiliation. They always get plenty of both from Ivy Compton-Burnett...
About 25 years later, Henry's philosopher brother, William, saw an image of "a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic [like a] sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes . . ." William turned into "a mass of quivering fear" at the thought that "That shape am I. . . potentially," and wondered how people could live "so unconscious of the pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life...
...appears that a civilization, like any other living thing in evolution, retains the shrunken vestiges of once-vital organs which no longer serve much real purpose, and only cause trouble if they try to. Take for example, in 20th Century U.S. civilization, the father of a bride. Take specifically Mr. Stanley Banks of 24 Maple Drive, Fairview Manor, a vestigial organ in a perfect state of preservation...
...Like father Day in Life With Father, Dad Gilbreth pretty much ran things his way; but there most of the resemblance ended. Whenever Dad Gilbreth, returning from a trip, turned in at the sidewalk of his Montclair, N.J. home, he whistled "assembly call"; it brought freckle-faced kids from upstairs, basement, backyard and even the next street. Sometimes his signal meant that he wanted to take everybody for a ride in the big Pierce-Arrow. "How do you feed all those kids, mister?" folks would yell when the car had to stop for an intersection. His favorite answer: "Well, they...