Word: mortally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Diving still occupies Greg Louganis but more and more so does dancing, and twelve years after Louganis won his first of three Olympic medals, mortal divers are overtaking him at last (or catching up at least). Watching Louganis in practice wear out the lift to the platform, outstaying the others by hours, makes one wonder how hard he must have toiled before eminence and elevators...
...memories ended with youth-league ball more than a quarter-century ago. For all the cliches about baseball being a boy's game played by grown men, we watch and root with ardor because we sense the truth: what happens on the big league diamond is life magnified beyond mortal dimension. Who in his or her daily existence has an experience to equal the champagne-drenched euphoria of a championship team? How can the workaday world match that moment when the last out is recorded and the players embrace in bacchanalian frenzy out near the pitcher's mound, pummeling...
...baffled as to how good kids could go so far wrong so fast. "James Patrick Cooney was a happy-go-lucky kid, confident of himself." Confident, perhaps cocksure. Away from the protection of adults, Cooney and his friends indulged the illusion they were exempt from death and other mortal coils, as the young tend to do, this time to a deadly...
Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people -- the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books...
...frenetic dreams of a dying woman. Ancient astral priests dress her for a mysterious ritual: paint on her body, diamonds on the soles of her feet, finally a branding iron pressed to her lips. A rude flash, and we see the scene of a car accident. The jewels are mortal wounds, the priests surgeons, the vision one of hope and fear for the unknown world that follows death. Visually, Russell's sequence is pitched at see above high- see. Emotionally, it takes preposterous risks and pulls them...