Word: seconded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
...proposed, seemed sometimes to wallow in, what appeared to be--often joyously, often grimly was--chaos. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise...
Filled with post-World War I disillusionment and despair, this allusive, fragmented epic became a touchstone of modern sensibility, and its haunting, haunted language sang the passing of old certainties in a century adrift. RUNNERS-UP The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats; Home Burial by Robert Frost...
This totemic reduction of nature--the streamlining of a bird's body, the swish of its flight--was a prediction of the technological world to come in the second half of the century. RUNNERS-UP Guitar by Pablo Picasso; The Chariot by Alberto Giacometti...
...that the Book of Revelation is literally correct. Rogers is great as the born-again mother whose crisis of faith causes her to ask "who forgives God?" at precisely the wrong time. And any film that starts with lots of group sex and ends with what is literally the Second Coming is not to be missed...