Word: minding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here is no childish optimism but rather a declaration of principles, a way of dealing practically with a world bent on destroying her. It is the cry of the Jew in the attic, but it is also the cry of the 20th century mind, of the refugee forced to wander in deserts of someone else's manufacture, of the invisible man who asserts his visibility. And the telling thing about her statement of "I am" is that it bears no traces of self-indulgence. In a late entry, she wondered, "Is it really good to follow almost entirely...
...last words ("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man") that somebody invented or reported; the anonymous burial and the hacked-off hands, as if his killers feared him more after he was dead than when he had been alive: all of it is scalded into the mind and memory of those defiant times. He would resurrect, young people shouted in the late '60s; I can remember fervently proclaiming it in the streets of Santiago, Chile, while similar vows exploded across Latin America. !No lo vamos a olvidar! We won't let him be forgotten...
What romances defined love in the 20th century? Many come to mind. There was Mrs. Strauss aboard H.M.S. Titanic, refusing to be rescued and declaring, "We have been living together for many years. Where you go, I go." Then there was actress Marion Davies. When her lover, publisher William Randolph Hearst, fell on hard times, she sold off her real estate, stocks and jewelry to keep his creditors at bay. There was the scandal of Charlie Chaplin, who married the very young Oona O'Neill and actually got to live happily ever after with her. And of course Frank Sinatra...
...Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Alice was "Pussy" to Gertrude; Gertrude was "Lovey" to Alice. And if out walking for a while with a friend, Gertrude would say, "We must be getting back to Alice. If I am away from her long, I get low in my mind." Discussing homosexuality, Stein once told Hemingway that men were disgusted after sex together but "in women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by...afterwards they are happy and can lead happy lives together." After Gertrude died in 1946, Alice lived on, serving Stein's reputation...
...read this in a book somewhere, and it's stuck in my mind. As far as I can tell, it's true." (Saturday, July...