Word: oracular
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...depths of nature also rise religious images and rituals of uncanny beauty and effectiveness. At one point the camera sits in a ring of savages inside a narrow, smoky lodge of woven vines, and watches a witch doctor fling a bag of oracular bones on the earthen floor and read their patterns as Confucius read the sacred stalks of yarrow. At another it investigates the religion of the pangolin, "the animal no one may hurt," an anteater that looks like a waddling artichoke and possesses some of the metaphysical properties of the rose: an image, for the Christian mystics...
...oracular way, De Gaulle himself gave two other reasons for his desire to postpone a summit. The first is a fundamental disagreement with Britain and the U.S. over what a summit should be. Macmillan, in particular, talks of a series of summits, none of which would be make-or-break. De Gaulle, who believes that familiarity breeds contempt and that a certain modicum of mystery is essential to governing, sees the summit as a single 'grand encounter" that must be "carefully prepared"; as he expressed it in a communiqué last week, there should be an effective reduction...
...author's delight in being oracular does not detract much from a clever investigation into mysticism and the mystique of power. The ironic Artist Tutmose-whose hauntingly beautiful head of Nefertiti is on view in West Berlin's Dahlem Museum-solves only part of the puzzle when, near the book's end, he concludes that "beyond our own motives, existence has no reason." Perhaps, Stacton seems to be saying, the puzzle of existence constitutes its own reason...
...along, too, De Gaulle made highly effective use of surprise, silence, and silence's sister, the oracular utterance. "I have understood you," he told a wildly cheering crowd during his first trip to Algiers after becoming Premier. Only four months later, when he abruptly ordered all French army officers to resign from the insurrectionary Committees of Public Safety, did the right-wing Europeans of Algiers realize that what he had meant was that he understood them and disapproved. Last week, with almost equal lack of forewarning, De Gaulle suddenly began churning out a series of decrees that he had been...
Togged up like a leftover from Hans Brinker, oracular Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey relaxed in triumph after his headline-grabbing junket...