Word: monumental
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...many Americans, it remains one of the incandescent moments in living memory. Facing a throng of 250,000 on the capital Mall, with the Washington Monument soaring before him and the white marble figure of Abraham Lincoln brooding behind him, Martin Luther King Jr. turned mere spectacle into a kind of national epiphany. "I have a dream today," he declared. And again, "I have a dream today." And again. He used the words as more than refrain, more than cadence, almost as biblical exhortation. And as his listeners cheered him more loudly each time he repeated them, King built toward...
...known primarily to the most sophisticated musicians, and only a handful of Mozart's myriad works were regularly performed. With composers like Schumann, Brahms and Wagner churning out masterwork after masterwork, there was little need to revive the past. But as the musical repertory gradually evolved into a monument to the 19th century, inquiring performers began to look backward. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), an English musician and instrumentmaker, rediscovered the nearly forgotten world of the viol, lute and clavichord, and Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska almost singlehanded shattered the romantic tradition of performing Bach on the piano. "You play Bach your...
...from the Japanese practice of eating it every day for pleasure. Even Kobe beef, on which every Japanese dotes when he can afford to, is a Western import. The first cow butchered in Japan died for the table of an American consul in Shimoda in the 1850s, and a monument has since been raised to it by the butchers' association of Japan. Before that, cattle were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of eating roast tractor parts...
...representatives of Rural Solidarity" during a meeting in April 1981. The crowd roared even louder when John Paul told them he had come to "kneel in this place and pay homage," in a reference to a memorial to Polish workers slain in Poznan during riots in 1956. The monument, which consists of two intertwined crosses next to a stylized Polish eagle, was erected during the Solidarity era and was conspicuously omitted from the list of papal stops in the city...
John Paul also visited the site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. The Pope stooped to lay a bouquet of red carnations at the base of the tall black granite and marble monument and paused to study the heroic figures in bas relief, representing the 69,000 Jews who held out against Nazi forces for three weeks. News of the Pope's unexpected arrival spread quickly. Poles rushed to the windows of drab prefabricated apartment blocks overlooking the monument and congregated in a park laid out after the war on the rubble of the ghetto...