Word: pretenders
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...senior year, a favorite game was “pretend it’s your future.” Hanging out at the local coffeehouse, we were 22, recent graduates from our top-choice colleges, working in banking, fortune-telling, anything, when strangers engaged us in conversation. For me it was an easy game, since it was the future I’d envisioned for myself since eighth grade: Go to Harvard. Come back home...
Materialistic is a Marxist term and, in the context of this lunatic search for Lenin's "genius," a kind one. A better word is reductionist: there is no better example of scientific reductionism than to look for--let alone to pretend to have found--the source of Lenin's powers in the pyramidal cells of his brain. Even if one were to concede that in principle, and in some far-off century, psychology will be reducible to anatomy, science will hardly give us the key to evil and genius, which are, after all, not physical but cultural phenomena. The problem...
Punishment is merciless for writers of novels that ring in the mind. Unsophisticated readers demand the same bells next time, only louder. Sophisticated readers pretend they do not want an encore, although they really do, and they are vigilant in condemning repetition...
...every dragon, lion or bear, there is an emblem that seems to have no ferocity at all. A modern officer might not wish to appear before his men with a pair of enormous formalized rabbit ears stuck to his helmet. One might as well pretend to be a chicken. But not in 17th century Japan, where rabbits symbolized long life and virility and were a favored helmet motif. (Americans see an old man in the moon; Japanese saw the silhouette of a rabbit with mortar and pestle, pounding out the elixir of life.) Likewise, the clam is peaceable...
...it’s not like there’s some kind of false advertising going on. Harvard doesn’t pretend to be located in Daytona Beach—where it seemed Ms. Miniskirt might have better luck finding her fellow orange-hued brethren. While the University website might show lovely photos of Harvard in the springtime, you’d have to be inbred to think that Cambridge is a bastion of sunny, mild weather...