Word: primal
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...Wells saw the future in American technology, the mystagogic D.H. Lawrence drew a distinction between primal America, which appealed to his fancy sense of atavism, and "the mechanical empire of Uncle Samdom." Auden picked up at least a part of the theme. Wrote Conrad: "The economic vice of Europeans, in Auden's view, is avarice, while that of Americans is waste." Nature, vast and promising, exists ultimately to be conquered and transformed into the benisons of the shopping mall. But at the far end of the interpretation, God's plenitude and bounty begin to be exhausted. What then...
Obsessive weather monitoring, in any case, is an old American custom. Thomas Jefferson was mysteriously compulsive about the weather. He kept interminable logs of changes in the temperature. He knew what millions in the weathercasters' audiences may sense: if you know what the weather (a primal force in the world) is up to, you are somehow, obscurely but actually, in control...
...giving way to the competition. This is all the more remarkable because the two Floyd albums between The Moon and The Wall achieved only modest success. There was every reason to believe that the Floyd had gone under, sunk beneath the collective weight of their cosmic speculations and primal ruminations. The resurgence represented by The Wall and by the Pinkies' current concert tour, which is touching down only in New York City and Los Angeles, is a reminder that the only commercial constant in pop music is unpredictability...
...dumped before Hecuba's gaze. She is past weeping by now. She wants the gift of death, surcease from all sorrow. But she has a priority: vengeance. Before the final curtain, Polymestor lurches forward on all fours, his eye sockets craters of streaming blood. He utters the primal howl that punctuates these plays. It is the moment when all reason has toppled and the dogs of fate rend man with total indifference. In Shakespeare's words, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." And the sport has not finished...
...actualizing," to mean the fulfillment of potential. "I hear you" has descended from the aural to the banal; it means a total understanding of the speaker's temperament. "Lifing" is the effort to derive the utmost from every day; "Who are you screaming with?" a glancing allusion to primal therapy, is now a query about any psychological aid the subject is seeking...