Word: thingness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...asked on a television show what he would have done with his life, given a choice. After an awkward pause--a rare thing, indeed--he admitted he couldn't think of anything other than boxing. That is all he had ever wanted or wished for. He couldn't imagine anything else. He defended boxing as a sport: "You don't have to be hit in boxing. People don't understand that...
Oscar Wilde once suggested that you kill the thing you love. In Ali's case, it was the reverse: what he loved, in a sense, killed him. The man who was the most loquacious of athletes ("I am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates") now says almost nothing: he moves slowly through the crowds and signs autographs. He has probably signed more autographs than any other athlete ever, living or dead. It is his principal activity at home, working at his desk. He was once denied an autograph by his idol, Sugar Ray Robinson ("Hello, kid, how ya doin...
...good century for the Chinese. After dominating much of the past two millenniums in science and philosophy, they've spent the past 100 years being invaded, split apart and patronizingly lectured by the West. And, let's face it, this communism thing isn't working out either...
...bent on destroying her. It is the cry of the Jew in the attic, but it is also the cry of the 20th century mind, of the refugee forced to wander in deserts of someone else's manufacture, of the invisible man who asserts his visibility. And the telling thing about her statement of "I am" is that it bears no traces of self-indulgence. In a late entry, she wondered, "Is it really good to follow almost entirely my own conscience?" In our time of holy self-expression, the idea that truth lies outside one's own troubles comes...
Diana was a princess, but there are many princesses in Europe, none of whom ever came close to capturing the popular imagination the way she did. Princess Grace of Monaco was perhaps the nearest thing, but then she had really been a movie star, which surely provided the vital luster to her role as figurehead of a country that is little more than a gambling casino on the southern coast of France. The rather louche glamour of Monaco's royal family is nothing compared with the fading but still palpable grandeur of the British monarchy. To those who savor such...