Word: magics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...profoundly encoded in the human brain. Peace is also a slow, perilous process of equilibrium, but deep space is a siren summoning the race to an unimaginable catalogue of unknowns. To reach the moon is only to touch the rattle dangling over the crib. The reach has lost its magic-or perhaps not yet really found it-because like infants, men scarcely can conceive of what lies beyond in space and time. Such perspectives, even in man's minuscule neighborhood of the galaxy, tend to reduce the affairs of earth's superpowers to cosmic unimportance...
...economy can certainly use a magic trick. Inflation was held last year to less than 6%, and fish-meal exports rose to the highest tonnage ever. But the world price of copper, Peru's most important foreign-exchange earner, has dropped from 700 in March...
Since then, cult leaders have tried again and again to duplicate the white man's magic. They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came. They built structures that look like white men's banks, but no money materialized...
...neither the birds nor the jets had appeared. But even if they never show, the people of New Guinea's primitive north coast are not likely to abandon the so-called "cargo cult" -a conviction that if only the dark-skinned people can hit on the magic formula, they can, without working, acquire all the wealth and possessions that seem concentrated in the white world. Officials are forever trying to explain how the world uses labor, capital and raw materials to acquire its "cargo," but that is all so much hocus-pocus to the tribesmen. As Sydney University Anthropologist...
Just before Tender Is the Night was published in 1934, Scott Fitzgerald mused to his friend Gerald Murphy, who served as one of the models for Dick Diver: "It has magic. It has magic." It was indeed a seductive book, and a nimbus of equally powerful magic surrounded its author. Though Scott squandered his talent and Zelda went mad, legend still holds firmly that they were enchanted people somehow removed from the dailiness of life...