Word: shrines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...flour business, regularly had ideas that some people, particularly his wife, did not take completely seriously. For instance, the deterioration of his boyhood neighborhood gave him the idea that, for a modest sum, he could buy the house he was born in and turn it into a national shrine...
...course, feel square saying it. Pat would groan, and just to let him know that I was not completely lacking in the imagination to appreciate an inspired idea, I'd tell him how much I had always admired that scheme for turning his boyhood home into a national shrine...
...during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Some activists vowed to set themselves on fire, emulating the suicidal monks of the 1960s. Last week's larger but more peaceful crowd chanted slogans criticizing Tran as the sounds of mortar blasts and machine-gun fire boomed from loudspeakers. An elaborate shrine of candles, flowers and incense rests in front of two mock coffins bearing American and Vietnamese war victims. All that's missing is food vendors. Nope. Here comes someone hawking doughnuts and soymilk...
...Really, Widener is dead. Widener's mom is dead. His little shrine is an example of history not used for what it can teach, but history simply as an obsession. Form isn't complementing function-it is toppling it. I mean, the man collected books--presumably he had an interest in their contents. When our sense of the past gets out of hand, the dead, whom we try to remember because they lived and because we like the way they did so, become like museums or antique stores, where children are instructed to keep their hands in their pockets...
Really, Widener is dead. Widener's mom is dead. His little shrine is an example of history not used for what it can teach, but history simply as an obsession. Form isn't complementing function-it is toppling it. I mean, the man collected books--presumably he had an interest in their contents. When our sense of the past gets out of hand, the dead, whom we try to remember because they lived and because we like the way they did so, become like museums or antique stores, where children are instructed to keep their hands in their pockets...