Word: swiftly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...late in the morning, and the Communist antiaircraft crews guarding the bridge on Route 7, ten miles from the Laotian village of Ban Ban, were probably not hankering for extra work. Suddenly they had their hands-and gun sights-full. Screaming in low from surrounding hills was a long, swift file of supersonic U.S. Air Force jet fighters, which loosed a blizzard of bombs on the bridge, blowing it to bits...
...pressure was steeply stepped up by the arrival in Ireland of Esther Vanhomrigh, a young woman Swift had known in London. After eight years of harrowing tension-it seems clear that the affair was never consummated-Swift apparently chose Hester instead of Esther. A few weeks later, at the age of 33, Esther died...
...Swift's rage destroyed human beings, but it created literature. Night after night the old churl sat by a snug fire in his splendid mansion and wrote hate letters to a world he chose to think had cheated him. In 1726, after six years of meticulous composition, he published Gulliver's Travels, the most profound and powerful satire ever written in English...
Yahoo Obsession. Author Dennis studies the Travels as a morbid acrostic of Swift's character. In Part IV, for instance, there are striking suggestions that Swift at this period of his life was dangerously schizoid, that he was identifying with the rational-spiritual principle (the Houyhnhnms) and repressing the animal aspect of his nature (the Yahoos). In any case, the horror and tragedy of Swift's old age are clearly foretold in the leading characteristic of the Yahoos: their excessive concern I with ordure. From that time forward, scatological allusions litter his prose and befoul his poetry...
...grew older, as dizziness, deafness and amnesia successively set in, Swift lapsed into "incessant strains of obscenity and swearing." A statute of lunacy was taken out against him, and he spent the last three years of his life sunk in bestial stupor. "I am what I am," he muttered not long before his death. "I am what I am." He was a Yahoo. Yet he was Lucifer too: the great sinner was also a bringer of light...