Word: underfoot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fact it will be the constant in our lives-the taste of dampness like stale cigarette smoke in the morning, the dead leaves in the Common like soggy Wheaties underfoot, the chill that seeps under doors, permeating our clothes, our sheets, our skin. But the sound, most of all, will pervade existence; it will be the insistent insidious counterpoint to clammy kisses and perspiring embraces, to lectures and marches and meals, until we find ourselves praying for a cataclysm, an orgasmic deluge to end the monotonous drizzle...
Uphill Fight. North Miamians can no longer walk across their lawns without crunching shells underfoot, and the snail outbreak may get still worse. Endowed with both male and female reproductive organs, the hermaphroditic snail multiplies at a phenomenal rate. In his authoritative study The Giant African Snail, University of Arizona Malacologist Albert R. Mead calculates that a single animal could theoretically produce 8 billion descendants in three years. Such spectacular proliferation requires a huge food supply-for example, Florida's luxuriant cash crops...
...those who set them on us-they too will be trampled underfoot...
Illness: Because you are sickly, you rarely attend school. Around the house you're always underfoot; they give you a drum kit to keep busy. As a consequence of your obession with drums you are unfit for useful work. It looks like you're going to be a ne'er-do-well, so you get together with some other kids who are also ne'er-do-wells and form a rock group. At your first recording session another group asks you to be their drummer. You join them; change your name to Ringo; and escape oblivion for fame and influence...
...they too involve a commitment that will eventually crumble. "At our limits a God appears, or something that serves his turn," says Cioran, who is at once an unbeliever and a profoundly religious man. "I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot." Yet Cioran rejects faith as just another self-deception. "I write to rid myself of my obsessions, of my anguish," he says. "But I believe in nothing...