Word: paganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Corot was much better at trees than people, let alone pagan divinities. His weakest drawings are of the figure, his strongest of vegetable nature--one especially, an ink drawing of creepers on a rock done around 1827, has a wiry inquisitorial line and a fierce truth to the motif that remind one, without exaggeration, of Durer. In landscape his hand roamed free, giving the foreground hill in Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres...
Adams House residents are eager to share their rituals. The traditions of group sex and pagan rites may have reached its peak last year when a group of juniors hosted a Saturnalian debauchery, inspired by research in the Widener classics stacks...
Dear old Saint Valentine hardly has a romantic story. He spent his working days as a pagan priest and physician in ancient Rome until he was thrown in jail for protecting persecuted Christians. While in jail, Valentine converted to Christianity and restored sight to the jailer's daughter. Then they clubbed him to death, which when you think about it, was a relatively painless way to achieve martyrdom in those days. It sure beat the lions...
...origins of our tacky celebrations apparently derive not from the martyr but from one of two other sources. Historians place the Roman festival of Lupercalia in the middle of February and suggest that a pagan bacchanal might have developed over the course of centuries into our tamer celebration of romantic love. Alternatively, a poetic mistake might have placed the dawning of spring in the middle of winter...
...these outbreaks of irrationalism? Because in a highly technological age, where not just production but now information and thought itself are being mechanized, the need for escape is powerful. The world is too much with us. William Wordsworth yearned "to be a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn." We're not immune. Indeed, an age in which we carry around 6-lb. boxes that can digitize information and rationalize thought at 133 MHz is an age even more susceptible to the call of the wild...