Word: locus
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Arafat is also caught in a political squeeze. The gulf leaders refuse his calls, and he is unwelcome in their countries. In addition, the emerging Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian axis cuts him out of the locus of power. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak feels personally betrayed by Arafat, and Syria's Hafez Assad has long disdained...
...exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought...
...ways like the tunes on a Randy Travis album. But, with the exception of the wondrous O'Kanes, the sounds in the country air do not abound with enigma. Country has traditionally run to chill depths, though. When Patsy Cline sang Walking After Midnight, she found a lonesomeness whose locus was closer to the soul than the heart. When the Cowboy Junkies cover Cline's tune on their just released RCA album, The Trinity Session, they bring something extra of their own to it, something haunted. In the false lull of Margo Timmins' lovely voice and measured phrasing there...
...centuries later, with Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, it is in full spate; and from then on, Latin literature pullulates with rustic shepherds, flutes, nymphs and country retreats. When the classics were revived by Renaissance scholars (no strangers to urban anxiety themselves), the fantasy of the locus amoenus, the sylvan wilderness as "delightful place," moved to the forefront of the Western imagination. There it still reigns, vastly complicated and mutated by real necessity, in the form of the environmental movement...
...17th century the classical world was the locus of ideal beauty, but how did a Frenchman enter it? A writer could read Vergil without leaving Paris, but a painter had to go to Rome. There, ancient sculpture and architecture abounded; from them, antiquity could be reimagined. It was the strength of the reimagining, not just its archaeological correctness, that counted. Poussin's main regular job during his Roman years was drawing records of ancient sculpture for a rich antiquary and scholar named Cassiano dal Pozzo. This gave him excellent access to collections, and the time to develop the repertoire...