Word: rituals
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...this weekend there will be over 4000 different boats on the Charles taking part in Cambridge's annual fall ritual. And while Harvard and Radcliffe's top boats will be killing themselves to be the first down the river, others will not be quite as gung...
Thousand-year blocks of time enforce a chastening standard of weight and scale. The millennium has a gravitational pull that draws in the largest meanings, if only because its frame of reference is so enormous. The millennial drama represents nothing less than the ritual death and rebirth of history, one thousand-year epoch yielding to another. Such imponderable masses of time overwhelm and humble the individual life-span, reducing human tragedies and accomplishments to windblown powder...
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, with their emphasis on ritual, are well suited to a world in which few people bother to read. Theology is a dying art. Schoolchildren are ignorant of the Bible and hence bereft of their spiritual heritage. The postliterate era has been especially difficult for Protestantism, which depended so heavily upon rationalism and reading. Although old-style Protestants are shrinking in numbers, they retain outsize influence because so many of them remain book readers and are thus inevitably leaders of the economic ruling class on all continents...
...three years in Cambridge, I have managed to acclimate myself to the snow, Boston drivers, and Hare Krishnas. But despite the wealth of culinary choices the area offers, I cannot get a decent plate of chitlins (the correct pronunciation of chitterlings) to save my life. Eating as ritual does not exist here as it did at home. Everyday, I used to stop of at my Aunt Bessie's house for supper. Where I live lunch does not exist as a meal. The word "lunch" itself is too short to signify a substantial meal. It's only one syllable...
...SELF-CONGRATULATORY RITUAL, repeated every day, every week, all over America. Separate the clear glass bottles from the green and amber ones. Place the newsprint in one basket, mixed white paper in another, the reams of used computer paper in a third. Haul the whole lot out to the curb. There. You've just done your bit for humanity: you've recycled. It's Miller time...