Word: mythic
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Indeed this sort of mythic lore about the law school has been a thorn in the side of HLS administrators for more than two decades. Thanks in part to commercially-successful works like One L. by Scott F. Turow (HLS '78), or The Paper Chase, a book-turned-movie about the darker side of HLS, Harvard has struggled with the notion that one of its most prized graduate schools is less than perfect...
...story has assumed mythic proportions, like the sinking of the Titanic or Robert Falcon Scott's doomed race to the South Pole. Shortly after noon on June 8, 1924, the 38-year-old English schoolmaster and Alpinist George Leigh Mallory, along with a young companion, an Oxford engineering student and oarsman named Andrew ("Sandy") Irvine, 22, vanished into the mists surrounding the summit of 29,028-ft. Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, never to be heard from again...
...obsession doesn't stop there. At the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington D.C., Star Wars fans can view a photo gallery of "mythic images" from the series. Thousands of Internet sites have been established which offer everything from photos to sound bites to detailed summaries of characters and plotlines. Microsoft's home Web page, the first thing every single Internet Explorer user sees when logging on, has even included a new "Star Wars Guide," placed strategically at the top of the page next to links for stock quotes and maps. Visitors can see how much time is left...
Harvard's past is the mythic past; the fact that the deans give all incoming first-years a list of every past occupant of their rooms is conducive to such myth-making. We are all walking down well-trodden paths here, no matter how deviant we feel. And so we let others' pasts become our present, others' ambitions our own desires, others' fashions our own trademarks. There's a word for it, somewhere out there--if not in Portuguese, then perhaps there should be one in Harvardese. Joshua DERMAN Joshua Derman '99 is a philosophy concentrator in Quincy House...
...must have seemed like a good idea at the onset: Why not retell the mythic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time casting the principals as international pop/rock stars? Ergo Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt; 575 pages; $27.50), which recounts the fabulous lives and careers of the singer-composer Ormus Cama and his beloved co-vocalist Vina Apsara, as remembered by their mutual friend, the news photographer Umeed ("Rai") Merchant. His opening sentence foretells Vina's death--she was swallowed up by an earthquake in Mexico in 1989--and Rai presents himself...