Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Those dangling, immobile, from the cliffs are the Eskimos, the Polynesians, the Nomads-the arrested civilizations. Among the debris on the ledges are the bodies of the Sumeric, Babylonic, Egyptiac, Hellenic, Mexic and eleven other extinct societies. This is the image; and its evocation of the "infinitely multiple ordeal of man" is made bearable by Professor Toynbee's unifying insistence: history is not predetermined. Man may still choose to climb or not to climb...
...suffer this millennial death by inches? Toynbee's answer to the problem of causation is illumined by a daring dialectic. "The play," he says, "opens with a perfect state of Yin [the Sinic term for the state of perfect passivity opposed to which is Yang, the state of ordeal and creativity...
...listened to his predecessor's quick outline of what he was getting into. Back at the State Department, Marshall picked up the top-secret statements of U.S. policy on each country of the world. Then, for three quarters of an hour, he submitted patiently to the traditional ordeal by camera. At 4 p.m., he drove off for Leesburg and his first look at his colonial house since last spring...
Ideology is the figleaf of Soviet respectability. Tear it away, and the Russian leaders stand exposed as only the last of the long series of cruel and wasteful rulers who have driven a great people from one military ordeal to another throughout the course of centuries in order to assure the security of their own oppressive regimes. No one is more aware of this than the Soviet leaders themselves; and no one is more conscious than they of the terrible responsibility they bear to the doctrine of Marxism for the acts they have perpetrated in its name...
...swallow. But the drugs (which are dangerous and should be taken only by a doctor's prescription) are not much help after a victim gets his larynx between his teeth; they work best as a preventive. Partly psychological in effect, they help queasy travelers face the coming ordeal with mild bravado...