Word: mythically
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Intellectuals love baseball, and they read sweet meanings into it. The game "has a mythic quality," Bernard Malamud thought--the myths being innocent democracy, recovered childhood, a harmless, universal cast of heroes (from Ruth and DiMaggio long ago to McGwire and Sosa in last year's memorable season) and a sentimental reconciliation, over peanuts and Crackerjacks, between the college-educated and the working...
...time hunting seemed heroic: a test of manliness, a mythic pageant, a recreational surrogate for war. Ernest Hemingway was savagely, sometimes childishly competitive for trophy animals. The '60s brought a shift, and Vietnam a sort of anti-Hemingway revulsion. Michael Cimino's 1978 movie The Deer Hunter ended with the hero lowering his rifle, declining to kill a good-looking buck that, before Vietnam, he would happily have slaughtered...
...Seal has grown as a writer and a performer. His vocals, always strong, are now more nuanced and expressive. On the low-key breakup song, No Easy Way, he is aching and vulnerable; on the expansive When a Man Is Wrong, he is charismatic and commanding. Seal can sound mythic and virile and optimistic and lost and loving all in the same song. Yet he never oversings his compositions; he feels the spirit but is never ruled...
...hyperconsciousness of the tribal is one of the functions of city life. Certainly it was for Pollock, and from it stemmed his abiding interest in the "totemic"--in mythic images that were either lost to modern, Euro-American culture or buried so far back in its origins that they seemed mysterious and exotic. Pollock in the late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that...
...recently came across these words, uttered by a noted Harvard professor and thought they should be shared. It's a standard criticism of the place: too big, too self-absorbed, too cold. Harvard may have a mythic reputation, people say, but for the best undergraduate experience, you should go to Princeton or Amherst or Rice...