Word: mask
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than a white mask facing a black one. I see two pictures of the soul and spirit--if you will have it straight. In our flesh-and-blood existence I think we are pictures of something. So I see a picture, and a picture. Race has no bearing on it. I see Spofford Mitchell and Sally Sathers, two separatenesses, two separate and ignorant intelligences. One is staring at the other with terror, and the man is filled with a staggering passion to break through, in the only way he can conceive of breaking through--a sexual crash into release...
...FIRST STEP to joining this social elite, apparently, is to emulate the fellow who made it into the Exclusive Social Club and adopt the so-called "Molloy's Class Mask." The key to becoming so facially favored apparently, is to spend hours before a mirror aping the book's clearly-labeled diagrams, which show an upper-class executive type holding his head up, and an average slouch, well, slouching. This modern Pygmalion proceeds to offer up a self-graded speech test that seems to miss some of the subtleties of poor speech--one is downgraded for pronouncing "boil" "berle...
...until recent times"-without it, most European culture up to about 1600 could fairly be called primitive. Above all, the word cannot mean crude or inarticulate. Few European medieval ivory carvings are as exquisitely realized, in detail and in the round, as the Met's ivory Bini mask of a Nigerian ruler; and the technical finesse of pre-Columbian gold ornaments, brought back by the conquistadors from South America, astonished Albrecht Dürer in the 16th century as much as it does us today...
After all this winding, the plot should tick toward the hour of denouement. Instead, The Villa Golitsyn keeps exploding. Its cloak-and-dagger trappings mask a quest that is much more serious and dangerous than the entrapment of a possible spy. Before his mission is completed, Milson is forced to test his own flexible, contemporary morals in a series of severe challenges. He becomes, however unwillingly, a student of Christian theology and then its potential victim. Near the end, he must save either himself or his conscience...
Sabom does not think so. As evidence, he cites patients who had extremely sharp autoscopic memories. They were often able to describe the minutiae of their own cardiopulmonary resuscitation: readings on a monitor, the color of an oxygen mask, the number of electric shocks administered, the exact position of doctors around the table and what they talked about (in one case, golf). These memories, Sabom found, conformed precisely with doctors' accounts. Was it possible that some chronic cardiac patients were simply familiar enough with CPR procedures (from experience and television) to fantasize accurately about what took place? Sabom...