Word: pompeii
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...summer reading. But E.H. Gombrich is not the usual historian, and The Sense of Order is not a standard history. Subtitled "A study in the psychology of decorative art," this wittily illustrated volume ranges from a New Yorker cover of Saul Steinberg's to a wall inscription of Pompeii. Gombrich's central thesis concerns the need for order that resides in every human brain. Sometimes nature is accommodating: in hexagonal snowflakes, in the rhythmic chirping of crickets, in the natural laws of gravity and motion. Far more often, the eye sees chaos and the hand seeks to regulate...
...Pascal's thought: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." But vacations, in a secular sense, have an ancient history. Inns, restaurants, baths and theaters turned up in the archaeological digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii. For just as long, vacationers have been subdivided into spiritual castes: the enthusiasts who live all the rest of the year waiting for their temporary release, like school children in early June; and the possibly larger tribe that comes home every year from its outings, hurls suitcases into closets...
Phnom-Penh opens its doors ever so slightly: Pompeii without the ashes...
...other occasions a searching question by the Americans would elicit a long response in Khmer that would then be interpreted by the accompanying official as "I don't know." Phnom-Penh, said Dudman, had "the eerie quiet of a dead place-a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the ashes ... My first impression was that the total population of the capital could not be more than a very few thousand. The usual estimate of 20,000 seemed high, and the official figure of 200,000 given by the Cambodians and the Chinese seemed ridiculous...
...habit of incrusting the skin of the figures with artsy-craftsy fern patterns and other vegetable decor, to their detriment. But her references to an archaeological past are almost always successful. The biscuity surface of the sprawl ing bodies alludes, though not blatantly, to the plaster corpses of Pompeii, just as the division into parts refers to the cult of the antique fragment ? a hand here, a fragment of leg there, a split face...