Word: protean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...From this sad landscape, littered with insignificant talents fit only for doctoral theses or bourgeois mantels, a few fine painters emerged: Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, a handful of others. Giovanni-Battista Tiepolo, in fact, seems in retrospect to have been the last Italian artist formed in the heroic mold. A protean figure of bewildering facility and adaptability, he was the link between high historical painting and rococo elegance, able to invest a pen drawing with as much tension and airy scale as a painted ceiling. But generally the 18th century seemed to be Anglo-French territory: Italy's long moment...
...Though hypocrisy can take you far, it can only take you so far," says Dick Gibson, the protean-enriched radio personality of Stanley Elkin's third novel. It is one of those ebullient statements that instantly sprouts provocative questions: How far do you want to go? Who will you be when you get there...
Thus John Gardner, the protean former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, explained the mood in which last summer he founded a citizens' lobby called Common Cause (TIME, Aug. 10). From the start, Gardner, 58, gave Common Cause uncommonly experienced leadership, since he is a familiar of classroom and board room as well as Government. His mission is to reform the American system from within, and in Common Cause's six short months since parturition, the response, he says, has been "simply astonishing...
LIFTON has hit on a very important concept here, yet he insists on finding the reason for the phenomenon of Protean man in the malaise caused by the atomic bomb. In fact, while the bomb may have disoriented members of Lifton's generation, it is implausible to suggest that it accounts for the Protean man. The contemporary adult or young adult does not have as vivid a memory or understanding of the bombing as did Lifton, or John Hersey, and can not relate to it in the terms Lifton suggests. While psychological disorientation and the Protean state are observable...
Although he fails to provide a convincing link between Hiroshima and the revolutionary movement, Lifton does formulate one very intriguing thesis from his analysis of the aftermath of the nuclear era. He postulates the existence of what he calls Protean man, a man who has lost the boundaries of his own self. Protean man is in a state of total confusion, and finds himself embracing a series of conflicting ideologies for no apparent reason. "Until relatively recently, no more than one major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered...