Word: rite
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...They fall in love and go down to the city together to celebrate the carnival in the streets. There her enemy, who is Death, seeks her out and carries her away. Orpheus, heartbroken, goes looking for his lost love at the Bureau of Missing Persons, then at a diabolic rite where spirit-rappers summon up her ghost. In the end, he joins her in death...
...ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...candlelight, the brothers gathered in the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. With swelling pride, they chanted occult jargon and Tom Sawyerish vows. With stern mien, one night last week they launched an ancient rite: the not-so-gentle art of hazing new members before accepting them into the fraternity with its friendships and parties...
...sense to learn algebra and to be useful in the Scouts. Amen.") Hill is also astonished at the "strong note of penitence and personal remorse" that runs through the prayers ("I ask thy forgiveness for all the things I have done wrong"). For many children, he says, the rite of confirmation means forgiveness of sins more than admission into the adult fellowship of the church...
...every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power" without some sort of intellectual substantiation does not make an exciting theatre, I'm afraid. Mr. Rabb has captured much of the fire, horror, an virility of Streetcar; but he has missed the tenderness, the beauty, and the love that give the play dimension and stature...