Word: stillnesses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least-known 18th century American writings. Until the spring of his senior year. 1949, he was set to be a lawyer; then he changed his mind, turned down a place at the Law School, and went off to study history at Columbia. Back at Harvard a year later, still desulting about, he fell under the spell of Perry Miller. For a decade that greatest of Americanists and roistering misfit in this town of shut-ins goaded, cajoled, cursed Heimert up the academic ladder, until, just as he reached the top--with Miller, now dead, no longer there to guide...
...must have begun to appraise Miller's legacy. He might have seen Miller's desire to record all of the American spirit as an impossible gesture, leading always, as it did for Miller, to great and bitter loneliness. Again, it might have been that he recognized new and still unnamed callings within himself. His scholarly work continued--two years ago he edited a massive anthology of the 18th century religious literature he professes--but he spent more and more time with the undergraduates. Talking, arguing, he acquired an almost reflexive sympathy for the aspirations if not the solutions...
...minted the phrase. It also hints to his undergraduate audience, or the part of it which uses the words scarcely more gracefully than he, that neither are they. The play is brilliant, ceaseless, and for those too shy, too polite or too slow to answer back, intimidating. More dismaying still are his long silences and gestures of over-anxious assent. These are the times when he is learning a new part, not conversing but understudying, snatching your soul away before you have time to sell it. The knowledge gained in this way is astonishing. From his father, a railway...
...attempted to say how much in a long article published in the 1964 issue of the Harvard Review which commemmorated the latter's death, the article and his conversations make it clear that he does not consider himself qualified to judge. "It's too close," he says. "I still consider it Perry's business as well as mine, and for that reason I dislike speaking about it." The pair will probably never be untangled, intellectually or emotionally. They were, it seems, two great friends who also happened to be a father and son. One imagines them wandering into the Square...
...altogether too early to tell whether he will succeed. To most of the people in the House he is still that beligerent stranger. There is also the question of his stamina, or at least of his continuing interest. For as was to be expected he is not completely at home in this office, as he is not in any other. "I still have trouble introducing myself in the dinning room," he says. "Sometimes people don't know when I'm being ironic." Well, then, presenting Alan Heimert, All-American, Un-American Anti-Absolutist...