Word: spectral
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...medieval chapters Author Kirstein makes much of the fanatic Dance of Death which he calls a tombstone to medieval mentality. It was at the time of plagues that Death appeared as "a graveyard ghoul, a chilling spectral horror . . . frightening now only to listeners of ghost stories or children whistling past cemeteries." Its influence was tremendous. When the bubonic scourge swept Europe in 1373 wakes for the dead assumed an insane gaiety. While germs raged, one male dancer would feign death and a bevy of girls would hover around him, attempting to kiss him back to life. Such aberrations were widely...
Lying on his cot in the white glare, Anacleto was suddenly terrified to hear, softly, susurringly, as if from the Beyond, the voice of his dead friend. "Tit me mataste, Anacleto," came the spectral murmur. "You killed me. I am Areo's ghost. You had better confess, Anacleto. You killed me. . . ." Frenzied, bewildered, Anacleto stood it two days, two nights. Then he leaped up screaming: "I'm guilty! I'm guilty! I'm guilty!" A police stenographer rushed in and got a full confession...
...regular Met chorus, moreover, comes through with its characteristically amusing antics, presenting this time, among other numbers, a flower dance, by the use of colored stems and blossoms glowing brilliantly against a stage which is otherwise smothered in impenetrable blackness. A spectral watering-pot, bobbing, supposedly unsupported, above the stage to the rhythm of a soprano solo will amuse you as it converts anomalous dark masses into posies to start off this dance of the flowers...
...front gallery of Washington's tacky old Smithsonian Institution stand the plasticine ghosts of 33 famed U. S. women. Once the hostesses of a nation, their attitudes are models of spectral graciousness. Sitting placidly in her painted rose silk, motherly Martha Washington has raised her head as though she has just recalled that another of George's huge hose is hanging by the fire and needs mending. Mary Todd Lincoln, who loved style as much as her homely husband detested it, enjoys an elegant moment of respite in her pansy velvet gown, serene in the knowledge that...
...news of the day but behindhand on news of the century, still think in terms of an outmoded scientific materialism, unaware that in the last 40 years there has been the greatest scientific revolution since Copernicus. In this new dispensation "matter began to thin away into the completely spectral thing it has now become. . . . The notion of substance had to be replaced by the notion of behaviour. . . . Determinism has broken down, and the principle of indeterminacy has taken its place. There is great difference of opinion at present as to whether this is a genuine discovery, or as to whether...