Word: missionizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...large extent, therefore, the men of ideas have been merely cultivating their own gardens. Instead of one mission, they have many: they live as both a part of society and apart from it. The artist's fate, says Critic Edmund Wilson, is like that of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who was forced to live in isolation because of the stench of his wound, but whose comrades kept coming back to him because they needed his magic bow. So it has been with the intellectual to whom the nation goes for the expert's answer, and otherwise tends...
...Exodus. In 1917, Henri Martin Barzun came to the U.S. on a diplomatic mission, but when the time came to go home he decided to stay. While America's lost generation looked for a spiritual home abroad, scores of French scholars and artists sought refuge in America from the wave of cynicism sweeping over Europe. After a stay in Britain, young Jacques arrived in the U.S. "in ridiculous short pants and ignorant of baseball." But he was ready to enter college at 15½. The college he chose was Columbia. "To anyone from Europe, Columbia was the American university...
During World War 11 a girl came to a Flying Angel in an African port, said that she had married a British radio officer, had not heard from him and wanted a divorce. The Angel cabled the mission in Glasgow, the husband's home port, which in turn located the ship in Asia, where a third Angel sat down with the husband, helped him draft appropriate letters to his wife, which (with the African Angel's help) assured a happy ending...
...shuffling about with trays of ritual cocktails being served to what President Eliot once called--and his successors still call--'the society of educated men'. Even the olives and cherries, the orange peel, and toothpicks in the glasses seemed to have taken on moral dignities and a sense of mission which they can never hope to attain in the outer illiterate world where they are at the best the unashamed symbols of candid self-indulgence...
...unmapped country where Indians were apt at any time to take the warpath, Frémont persisted in carrying out his mission to the letter. When the Indians tried to use bluff, he bluffed back, and won. He won and kept for a lifetime the regard of Kit Carson and other mighty mountain men-proof enough that he had the courage and frontier skills to go with his looks and brains...