Word: understanding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hospital was a slow journey into the recesses of the mind. Some of them felt a massive relief on entering McLean. "Before I got to the hospital." one said. "I was constantly confronted with the accusation that I was losing my mind. The people around me could not understand actions that seemed perfectly rational to me. They wanted me to be like them, but I couldn't. I was split in two by an insoluble conflict, and I became suspicious of everyone. I always had to conceal myself. When I came to McLean, I found people who accepted everything...
...less stark contrast between a threatening outside world and a homelike hospital than that many patients face. As one boy explained, "Harvard students want to leave the hospital because they have a solid social structure to return to. In my case," he went on, "I was initially given to understand that I would stay about a year. But I left within three months. There were people I loved in Cambridge, and getting back to them was a tremendous incentive for me to get well...
...Definitions-if you understand already, advance...
...existentially stunted that they only point to parietal rules and the lack of "intellectual conversation" as reasons for doing away with dorms. But these complaints are abstractions on the periphery: the experience itself is too overwhelming to talk about. Not until they get off campus can people really understand why some of their friends go crazy...
...than obvious to one entangled in the petty quibbles of contemporary Medievalists-at times indeed, approaching the ludicrous-that, smile as we may at its follies, or denounce its barbaries, the truly monumental achievements of the Middle Ages have become too vast for us to cope with, or even understand; we are too small, and too afraid." Let me offer this as an ideal opening sentence on the Middle Ages. And now, you see, having dazzled me, having won me by your personal, involved, independently-minded assertion, your only job is to keep me awake. When I sleep I give...