Word: pillar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years Merton had been the most publicly visible Christian contemplative since St. Simeon Stylites took refuge on top of a pillar. Merton's pillar was print, and he had not exactly chosen it for himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing-as he had since...
Sneed, a tall, dark brown pillar of a man, works out of a seven-by-seven foot office allotted for the president. He is involved--unlike most bank presidents--in the day-to-day business of the bank and spends almost half his time assisting individual customers in the bank's main room. "We give really human service here and know our customers by name, not number," he boasted in a recent interview. But Unity is probably one of the only banks in the country where all customers have access to the executives at almost any time...
...struggling to learn the language and get accustomed to the unfamiliar food. All work and no poi made Takamiyama a dull boy. He dutifully performed an apprentice's chores, such as scrubbing senior wrestlers' backs, and spent long hours toughening his body by slamming against a wooden pillar...
...well-dressed man in Much Ado escapes a band of small-town hecklers by clambering to the top of a palm tree. There he turns himself into the latter-day equivalent of a 5th century pillar hermit. He promptly sheds all his clothes, capers among the fronds, and calls down unintelligible holy statements. Comments the narrator: "I could not resist a vague intellectual empathy toward the man who was now an abstraction - who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs...
...financed by the Emperor Augustus while writing the Aeneid, and repaid his patron with lavish praise of Augustan virtues. Emperor Trajan was so taken by his triumphs, that to satisfy his pride he had 2,500 of his followers' names carved into a 137-ft.-high marble pillar in the Forum at Rome. Alas, the custom has largely fallen into desuetude since Suetonius, who as the Emperor Hadrian's private secretary had the opportunity-and encouragement-to sift imperial dossiers. Had the practice been followed, history might read quite differently...