Word: raiments
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...glistening language that keeps the plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute...
...better part of his lifetime beating the bushes in search of spiritual insight and fulfillment. It is a hard job achieving nirvana, and seems to require a great deal of sitting by babbling brooks and talking in hushed tones. For a while Siddhartha embraces worldly things, including fine raiment, sumptuous food and Malala (Simi Garewal), the woman who he decrees will be his "love teacher." Finally he grows discontent and makes his way back to the one wise person he has met, a man who poles a raft back and forth across a river. Siddhartha has learned, as it were...
EVIL RETURNS. The devil, it can be reliably reported, is alive and well. He no longer appears in his ancient theological raiment; he is more subtly lodged in the human personality-a seventh circle of the psyche-where he is currently known as the instinct of aggression. Such is the description he has been given by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who argue that fundamental drives are the basis of human behavior. In the '60s, it was commonly supposed that the devil could be banished by improving human institutions, but he seems scarcely daunted by such superficial...
...faced with the choice between amateur therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the term avant-garde has outlived its usefulness. The hard thing to face is not that the emperor has no clothes; it is that beneath the raiment, there is no emperor...
...court and is highlighted by a magnificent group of icons" is unwarranted. From the profusion of royal riches in the Moscow Kremlin's Armory Museum (one look and you understand why the Revolution took place) the Soviet exhibition committee selected a bit of pearl-embroidered brocade from the raiment of a Russian Orthodox Patriarch, a pearl-encrusted red velvet boot, and Ivan the Terrible's embroidered saddle. The Armory also has a magnificent collection of bejeweled gold and silver filigree icon casings, spectacular chalices and royal plate. Only a dozen of the least successful, gaudiest pieces are on exhibition--ostentatiously...