Word: ritualism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kremlin the elaborate medical ritual went on-every flutter of an eyelid neatly noted, every rasp of breath counted. Murder by medicine was a recognized technique in the world Stalin built and ruled; his wary survivors labored to document a thorough record of the Boss's last moments...
...statue's name is Gomateswara, and he is a patron saint of India's Jain religion, an ancient offshoot of Hinduism. Half the population of India were once Jains, but their numbers have now shrunk to a bare 1,500,000. They dwindled possibly because of the ritual difficulties of their religion, which favors a strict asceticism and holds, among other tenets, that a believer must not harm any living thing, even worms or small insects...
...older woman meeting a younger one sees an image of her own lost youth, a little boy blurts out the awkward truth that a tableful of grownups has been avoiding, a house decays, a love dies, a ritual is born. Using the subtlest of baits, Author Pierce comes away with the novelist's prize catch, a bit of life at the end of almost every line...
...elaborate acts of ritual purity with which the new government is ushering itself into office are not encouraging. One may hope that they are only a temporary affliction of a party recently unused to power, and unsure of how to gain and hold the confidence of the people. If they are permanent, the new government will have great difficulty in adjusting to and meeting the enormously complicated problems facing it and the world, and its "odor of sanctity" will soon begin to stink...
...eyes of the world, he does. But Sandra starts tasting the lees of her marriage almost before she sips its joys. The wedding night, which she has pictured as a ritual of tenderness, is reduced to a matter of crass urgency. "Afterward he didn't give me a loving look, call me his darling and his queen . . . He reached for the cigarettes." After she stretches his small monthly paycheck to the limit, he carps querulously: "Is it all gone so soon...