Word: reconstruct
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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January 7--Through the recollections of Hans and others, I can tentatively reconstruct what happened during the coup. Almost everyone was surprised by the military action, the chaos leading up to it notwithstanding. Allende spoke over the radio at 7:30 a.m., telling the country the Navy had risen and that the workers should occupy the factories. He spoke again two hours later, saying all the military had revolted and that resistance would be futile. The soldiers, following long-standing contingency plans, fanned out rapidly through Santiago and occupied key sites, such as the radio and TV transmission towers atop...
...omniscient observer" stance becomes a problem, because they certainly are not omniscient, and, worse, they often pass themselves off as observers of actions they only heard about second or third hand. In other circumstances, they would be called gossips. Their most annoying excesses are the passages where they reconstruct someone's thoughts--investigative reporting is one thing, but mind-reading is quite another...
...West's view, Patty exhibited symptoms of dissociation when he brought up the subject of the bank robbery. She spoke about it like someone "trying to reconstruct a dream." What about the shoplifting fracas at Mel's Sporting Goods store, in which Patty helped the Harrises escape by firing weapons over their heads? West explained it away by saying that she performed exactly as she had been conditioned to do. He made much of Patty's first remark to the Harrises: "Did I do it right?" Patty, said the psychiatrist, was seeking their approval as though...
...such a shell around her--despite her desire to truly connect to the artists around her--that in the end they were left with an image, an evasive sense of having been taken apart by a force greater and more intense than their own creative energy. They could only reconstruct themselves by hurting...
...There is properly no history," wrote Emerson, "only biography." To reconstruct the New Mexican frontier of the 1860s, Horgan concentrates on Lamy. In the novel, the bishop experienced a constant inner joy: "He always awoke a young man ... One could breathe that [air] only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert." Horgan testifies to Lamy's love of Western saddle life, but concedes a sadder truth: "If he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, he left no record...