Word: mortals
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...budding, exhilarating, moving certainty that tomorrow can be now." Like the Seven Wonders of the World, the tape tells you, "it is a monument to man's daring imagination, ingenuity, and intelligence--awesome in size and inspiring in beauty...it is the greatest structure ever attempted by mortal man." The Superdome people, well-read in addition to everything else, say as William Faulkner once said of mankind that the Dome will not only survive; it will endure...
...more often, Alvarez's characters simply have nothing to say. Lack of raw imagination is no mortal sin, and there are other things to build novels on. But the sheer vacuousness of this book often verges on self-parody doubly so because the narrator is always there, reading off every inane thought. This from Sam, during fellatio...
DIETIES TO THE contrary notwithstanding, great writers are mortal: this is perhaps their greatest failing. When you've finished that last major Hardy novel, dug out the most forgotten Tolstoy short story, there is no more to look forward to. So it is with Jane Austen, the ultimate literary narcotic for the true believer. Six short novels to be read again and again, outings and conversations to be relived endlessly, the same people and families to be encountered over and over. But, frustratingly, no more...
...male population west of Minsk. The lovers are poor but wretched, living only on snow and an occasional treat of sleet. To relieve the chill, they engage in those favorite occupations of Russian novelists, the epistemological debate and the religious monologue. "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore all men are Socrates," concludes Boris. It is this kind of syllogism that moves him to assassinate Napoleon, an adventure that ends, of course, with the wrong man slain. No matter. A celestial sign appears and Boris trills: "I will run, not walk through the valley of the shadow...
Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does the word nation appear. The title of the final version described the document as "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united [small] States of America." There was no one capital city against which the British could aim a mortal blow. During the first five years of the War for Independence, British troops occupied every one of the most populous towns (Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston) without decisive effect on the war's outcome...