Word: strangerness
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...ornamented by a dazzling splash of tropical trees; to the left, an azure pool, inviting in look but impossible in perspective. Four couples, paired in matching pinks, yellows, lilacs and greens, disport themselves playfully while the estate's elegant mistress lounges provocatively on a poolside chaise. Suddenly a stranger springs into this daydreamer's view of a motley Mediterranean paradise: a macho greaser in shades, tight white pants and black silk shirt. The woman rises and sniffs the wind. This is Italy; an affair is in the air. This is also ballet: they dance. Passion and the poetry...
...almost continual creative activity of an intellect who towered so far above his society, and yet continually communicated with it and seemed to adapt to it, but who lived in it as a stranger, a condition neither he nor his circle could encompass; who grew ever more deeply estranged, never suspecting it himself until the end of his life, and making light of it until the very end--our imagination cannot accommodate such a phenomenon...
When practiced at certain universities, heckling to silence and expel the intruder achieves a tribal quality; it becomes a gesture of group solidarity, a way that certain zealots in the academic capsule reaffirm the received wisdom of their tribe and symbolically slay the stranger. As such, it is after all a comparatively harmless practice. If academe were more profoundly primitive, undergraduates might have to initiate themselves into the group by, say, ritually mutilating a Republican...
...tests of a great city is its receptivity to the foreigner, its openness to the stranger with unfamiliar ideas. That made Paris what it was and New York what it is. Raphael, appearing in some scrofulous Sicilian hill town in the cinquecento, would hardly have altered the history of cart decoration. Appearing in Rome, he changed the history of art. Something of this kind-the transformation that only urban cultures can produce, sparked by an apparently small event-had occurred in Naples...
Reed, who at 36 is now taking a year-long sabbatical from journalism as one of Harvard's Nileman fellows, is no stranger to dangerous situations. His journey to El Salvador was part of a more extensive three-month trip he took with six other Examiner journalists through Central America last year. He also covered the Liberty riots in Miami. He spent time in San Francisco's "Pink Place" housing project for a series of photo essays which finished second in last year's Pulitzer Prize ballotting...