Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees...
...city was a place of worship before it was a fortress or trading center, with a magical attraction for men who had always lived in wandering groups or in villages. Prudence might have dictated other sites, but men returned, again and again, to the cities they remembered. Troy was destroyed and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists classify their discoveries as Troy I through IX; Troy VIIA was the "Ilios, city of magnificent houses," as Homer called it, that fell to the duplicity of Greeks. Leveled by the Romans, Carthage returned to life to become the third city...
...great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon...
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris-or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar...
...been a suicide. A group of characters from his past have been summoned for the reading of the will. They make up a nicely varied assortment: two ex-wives-one of them an old dreadnought of an actress superbly played by Françoise Rosay-three mistresses and three men, including a dyspeptic theater critic, jealous of Antoine's sexual and professional success...