Word: unbidden
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...theme reappears unbidden in almost all conversations about Safire: his unusual capacity for nurturing intense friendships. "If I were in a desperate situation where I had only one phone call, it would be to Bill," says David Mahoney, the former chairman of Norton Simon. Similarly, Safire's literary agent Mort Janklow calls him a "great friend," someone he would trust to race to Bangkok in an emergency. Such sentiments sound saccharine, but Safire's friends tend to remember gifts he gave them 30 years ago. For Barbara Walters, who worked with him in p.r. in the late 1950s...
...ring cannot be subtle. Its mission is disruption. The phone is the instrument we were issued for a march into the age of discontinuity. The telephone call is a breaking-and-entering that we invite by having telephones in the first place. Someone unbidden barges in and for an instant or an hour usurps the ears and upsets the mind's prior arrangements. Life proceeds in particles, not waves. The author Cyril Connolly wrote lugubriously about the sheer intimacy of intrusion that a telephone can manage. "Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide...
...ruin of the middle distance. His claims were modest. He asked only for a hearing -- say, between cleaning up after supper and getting ready for bed, a few moments' attention to a poet speaking as if speech could still alter society and the perception of hours. On his birthday, unbidden, hundreds and perhaps thousands will give him an audience. Nothing has changed for these solitary readers, who have been massing over the years and decades. Some, indeed, may not know that he is gone and that one of his more memorable lines has become self-descriptive: "The communication...
...Reagans' enthusiasm for astrology comes as a small, slightly goofy revelation, an old Hollywood side of them that has turned up in Washington, a detail endearing and unbidden and embarrassing. Ronald Reagan has always been a lucky man. Perhaps he and his wife find that the zodiac is a means to codify, organize and predict his luck. Movie stars are suckers for astrology, partly because their business is even less rational than the rest of American life. Great egos need great horoscopes...
Womanizing was a side of Kennedy too: Did Hart take emulation that far? Yet one could also detect in Hart some unbidden traces of Richard Nixon. Some Americans sensed a troubling vibration in Gary Hart that was difficult to describe, but that rang wrong. Hart may be right to be bitter about the amateur psychiatry that has been practiced upon him. Still, Americans have fairly sensitive instruments of perception. Hart said last week that it was issues that gave him his "link" to the American people, a strange conceptual way of putting it -- as if he knew that...