Word: mythical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every argument against universal keycard access is weak. Safety will be compromised by universal access, some claim, because anyone with a Harvard ID can get in anywhere. Wrong. First, who are these Harvard ID-bearers the masters are afraid of? Harvard students? Or is it that mythic unshaven creature of Harvard Square, beer on his breath and bad deeds on his mind, who finds an ID in the crosswalk on Mass. Ave. and jumps at the chance to infiltrate the Harvard system? That is not likely to happen. People don't drop their ID cards on the street all that...
...romance, it left something to be desired. there was none of the mythic sweep of Tristan and Isolde, not a glimmer of the mystical intensity of Heathcliff and Catherine, nothing akin to Romeo and Juliet's tragic inevitability. But the affair between Bill and Monica--if affair is the appropriate word for an "inappropriate relationship"--has something to teach us anyway, in unexpected ways...
...possible that the Neanderthals are on to something. Despite all the talk of role models and ethics that has dominated the airwaves recently, male leadership isn't just rooted in morality; it has a murky, mythic basis too. Ask Machiavelli: Power is aura. Power is potency. The guys with the power tools illustrated a truth: even in nominal Judeo-Christians there's a lurking Nietzschean whose first commandment is, Thou Shalt Not Screw Up. His second is, If You Do, Don't Whine About...
Genre means, broadly speaking, the depiction of manners, work, morals--of men and women as social creatures. It's inherently a modest art, unlike the other model to which painters aspired when Mount was growing up: the Grand Manner, the elevated form of historical or mythic narrative, full of heroes and demigods, pagan or biblical. The trouble was that the Grand Manner was scarcely attainable in 1830s America. Not even Thomas Cole, a considerably more gifted artist than Mount, had managed to do it without bathos. Benjamin West, the prodigy from Philadelphia, had brought it off--but by going...
DIED. OCTAVIO PAZ, 84, Mexico's prolific man of letters who plumbed the mythic depths of his country's psyche in more than 40 volumes of poems and essays; of undisclosed causes; in Mexico City. Using his hybrid heritage (part Spanish, part Indian) as his starting point, Paz wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude, considered the seminal book on the Mexican mind-set. His starkly haunting metaphors of apathy and isolation made enemies among his countrymen but moved readers and, eventually, won him the Nobel Prize...