Word: likeness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Internet, it can be alienating. (Is it just me, or is e-mail a much poorer substitute for face-to-face contact than a phone call is? And if so, why am I letting e-mail crowd out my phone calls?) There is indeed the sense sometimes that, like neurons, we subordinate ourselves to the efficiency of the larger whole--that technology wins in the end, that culture trumps biology. As Emerson put it, "There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,--Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth...
...Live for friendship, live for love." Maybe all along it was the destiny of our species to be enmeshed in a web that would give us the option to exercise either amity or enmity over unprecedented distance, with unprecedented power. There are worse fates than to have a choice like that...
...watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
...exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." Eliot's nervous collage can only evoke the low vitality of his cityscape; he cannot embrace it. There are too many "young men carbuncular" within its limits, deceiving themselves with "systematic lies," failing to acknowledge "the agony and horror of modern...
Peeping warily into the new century, the cultural traditionalist (anyone over the age of 40) feels like saying, with Estragon in Waiting for Godot, "I can't go on like this." He forgets the brave and cheeky response Samuel Beckett, last of the classic modernists, gave to Vladimir: "That's what you think...