Word: placidness
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Last year, after capping off the regular season with a nine-game losing streak and managing only sixth place in the league, the Crimson sneaked into Lake Placid on its way to the ECAC finals...
Harvard, however, was too young and too tired to ward off the bigger Cornell squad. After 60 minutes of physical, emotional play, the Big Red walked away with a 4-2 victory the next night and a ticket to the ECAC semifinals in Lake Placid...
...course, a clever person in this situation can find one thing to complain about: things have gotten too placid, too settled, too nice. Aren't we really happiest in times of great conflict and danger? The novelist Walker Percy raised this point in his essays years ago. "Why," he asked, "is [a] man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?" Percy discussed the estrangement of the commuter passing through New Jersey: his needs are entirely satisfied, but he feels bad. "The Bomb would seem to be sufficient reason...
Bill Clinton may waft on about building bridges to the 21st century, but it was Ronald Reagan who really talked the millennial talk, what with his loose chat about Evil Empires and Armageddon. Surely, the 1980s would have made a better closing decade than the relatively placid late '90s--just about any decade of this cataclysmic century would have. And maybe that's why the millennium already feels like a dud. Compared with where we've been these past hundred years, the new age seems to promise normality more than doom or utopia. Which isn't a bad thing...
...concentrate on spiritually orphaned, Internet-lonely California is to miss the point, when mass suicides confront us in Canada, in South Korea, even in placid Switzerland. And to focus too much on the millenarian climate is to ignore the fact that even in Shakespeare, comets mark "change of times and states" (as he writes in the first sentence of Henry VI, Part 1). When prodigies break out in the fourth act of a Shakespearean tragedy, it is a sign that the time is out of joint: some fundamental link between man and his environment, as intrinsic as the link between...