Word: sophistication
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps only a sophist might be tempted to tie the spread of air conditioning to the coincidentally rising divorce rate, but every attentive realist must have noticed that even a little window unit can instigate domestic tension and chronic bickering between couples composed of one who likes it on all the time and another who does not. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, not everybody likes air conditioning. The necessarily sealed rooms or buildings make some feel claustrophobic, cut off from the real world. The rush, whir and clatter of cooling units annoys others. There are even a few eccentrics who object...
...core of Monet's achievement was his sense of time. He was fascinated by the discontinuous nature of reality: by the fact that, as a Greek sophist put it, you cannot step into the same river once, for it changes as the foot enters. Monet's Giverny paintings make up the most sustained and intelligent meditation on transience by a great artist since-what? Leonardo's water drawings? Probably, for although Monet's fellow impressionists also predicated their images on the moment, none of them was able to go so far in the direction of displaying...
...take a slice of river and, by giving it absolute presence, turn it into the stuff of contemplation. The Water Paintings are lyrical considerations of time and mutability, as well as matter. "You cannot," Heraclitus remarked, "step into the same river twice"-an observation that a later Greek sophist neatly amended: "You cannot step into the same river once." It is a text for the silences of Raffael's work...
...Magenta came into being at the dawn of Harvard's Golden Age, in the early years of Charles William Eliot, and no climate could have been better for fostering such an undertaking. John Finley has suggested that the rise of the Sophist came about because of the need of Athens for expositors of the new imperial civilization, and it is not by accident that Samuel Eliot Morison has referred to Charles William Eliot as "The enlarger of the empire." Eliot's new intellectual empire, as it brought together under the banner of "Veritas" the best and most progressive scholars, students...