Word: nimbus
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...these hills. Mostly they have rough, country faces and washed, flat, distantly Celtic eyes. People in wheelchairs are pushed up to his wheelchair, and George Wallace reaches out the gentlest communing hands to them, and spends long moments with each, consoling and almost, one thinks, healing. He has the nimbus of saint and martyr-or at any rate, of a celebrity who has passed through the fire and the greater world; he has come back to them from history, come back with powder burns...
...some reason, the more frivolous agitations of the collective antiself seem to have calmed down a little. Still, we walk around enveloped in it, like figures in the nimbus of their own ghosts on a television screen. Everything that we are not has a kind of evanescent being within us. We dream, and the dream is much of the definition of the true self. Last week Lena Home said that she has always imagined herself being a teacher. Norman Vincent Peale says fervently that he wanted to be a salesman-and of course that is, in a sense, what...
Something in Reagan has always been lucky; it has been part of his attraction, his charm, the nimbus around him. Reagan's luck has a distinctly American shine; his grin proclaims it, the confident expectation of the happy ending. That may be why the nation was drawn to him. Reagan's vehicle on the journey from Dixon, Ill., to Hollywood to the White House ran on persistence and self-knowledge, all right, but it was also propelled by a breezy admixture of the luck that the country was born with...
...certain Happy Days sentimentality has encouraged the idea that America in the '50s was touchingly innocent, but at the time the nation seemed infinitely more complicated than that, hugely varied, exuberant and, at this distance, rather strange. The benign nimbus of Eisenhower presided over all of it, and if people snickered at him behind his back, they seemed like adolescents wisecracking about the Old Man, Oedipal maybe, but not completely malicious...
...precisely Woody Allen's redeeming feature is that he places himself on the 'before' side; he knows that it's good to be able to laugh at yourself, but it's better not to find yourself needing to spend all your time in this pastime. Hence the nimbus of gloom on all his films. Certainly few people would recognize what makes Allen so popular in the tone Yacowar wields...