Word: miltonic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens. Jehovah's angels are powerful creatures; in Genesis they guard the east gates of Eden with flashing swords; in Ezekiel they overpower the prophet with awesome visions, four-headed, multiwinged and many eyed; in Revelation they do battle with a dragon. Milton describes the "flaming Seraph, fearless, though alone, encompassed round with foes." And Rilke wrote, "If the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us, our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death." Every angel, he declared, "is terrifying...
...their physical nature, angels were traditionally said to assume bodies only as needed to carry out a task. This meant that they had no gender, despite the sentimental Victorian image of the pale virgin with wings. Milton's angels, however, among the most vivid in literature, were robust figures who ate and drank freely. Raphael, in fact, "with a smile that glowed/ Celestial rosy red," blushingly explained to Adam and Eve how angels make love, "Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure/ Desiring...
...Iblis, a word perhaps derived from the Greek diabolos, the proudest of all God's creatures. And it was pride that would lead to Satan's rebellion and eventual expulsion from heaven. But even in the depths of hell, he retained an awe-inspiring dignity. In the words of Milton's Paradise Lost, "With grave aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed a pillar of state . . . princely counsel in his face yet shone, majestic though in ruin...
...that has given the chief of the fallen angels such power to tempt humankind. If humankind was created just a little lower than the angels, what are we to make of an angel who has failed? Is he then not just like us -- yet immortally so? For poets like Milton, Satan was the archetypal antihero, the rebel waging eternal guerrilla warfare against his Creator. "To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." Indeed, to some, Satan even provides lessons in piety. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, imagined that...
...task fell to Time imaging specialist Kin Wah Lam, who went to work on computerized photos of 14 models selected by Time's assistant picture editor Jay Colton. Aided and abetted by our issue's design directors, Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser, Lam spent more than 65 hours on the computer, using a complicated formula to produce the various combinations of offspring. The result is the fascinating chart on pages 66 and 67. Time makes no claim to scientific accuracy (although the process is described in more detail in the text accompanying the chart) but presents Lam's chimerical results...