Word: summonings
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...need be, your worship, I can summon witnesses to defend my way of life, such as it is. In "Memories of West Street and Lepke," Robert Lowell lamented, "I was so out of things," to indicate he was praising the condition. Unhappily, one of the things he was out of was his mind. In a movie, Oscar Levant told Joan Crawford, "Don't blame me, lady. I didn't make the world. I barely live on it." Somerset Maugham dignified the dreaming-out-the-window business. "A state of reverie," he said, "does not avoid reality; it accedes to reality...
...them, could stand me for very long, but all of them had the grace to take in a Jewish child." That was a quality singularly lacking elsewhere (particularly in the U.S.). Still, this moving tribute to a handful of candles flickering in the darkness has the power to summon us - one prays - to our better selves...
...dark day." The dark day is the one after they die, when their body gets embalmed and waits to go home and get buried, although the truth is that when they die, no one comes, and they get buried right here on the Farm. Cain thinks he can summon hope through a four-year Bible college, or the amateur rodeo the prisoners put on every year, or having them pick cotton by hand in the fields that were once a real plantation, and still really are, for 4[cents] an hour...
...three decades, Hafez Assad ruled Syria--and confounded the world. Six American Presidents found him frustrating, remote. The Egyptian pyramids lay to the southwest, but it was Assad who was dubbed the Sphinx. Assad remained a riddle. Austere, he neither smoked nor drank. He would summon aides at all hours to discuss an issue, then closet himself for days before abruptly announcing a decision. He never came to America; from Nixon to Clinton, they either traveled the road to Damascus or met him in neutral Geneva. They worried about elections and deadlines; a dictator, he never worried about the clock...
...cause memory loss or mental fuzziness, to say nothing of confused thinking--menopause, for example, whose effects can be eased with estrogen-replacement therapy. Also, keep in mind (remember?) that age takes a very normal toll on what psychologists call processing speed--the rapidity with which you can summon up the names of people and places. Our brains, in any case, have evolved with a certain built-in forgetfulness, lest they become hopelessly cluttered with useless information...