Word: thumbscrews
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament...
...Mass and private confession are outlawed, and the church's ecumenical embrace is even touching Buddhists. Theological liberalism and social activism, canonized by Rome's authority, have become the new orthodoxy. Rome is still Rome, however, ready to enforce the new dogmas with some of the same thumbscrew pressure that it once used to enforce...