Word: upon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nation...that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar...
...literature, things were ready to fall apart on their own, so any excuse to do so--especially one as revered as a theoretical restructuring of the universe--was embraced. In 1919 relativity exploded upon science. In 1922 T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land had a similar effect on literature. Yet when Eliot wrote, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," people took up the fragments but ignored the shoring...
...Like most of mankind he was ill prepared for the destiny and responsibility which had been thrust upon him. He did not want the responsibility; the destiny rested awkwardly on his shoulders...
...proposed, seemed sometimes to wallow in, what appeared to be--often joyously, often grimly was--chaos. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise...
...Muslims. When the Christian knights retreated to the coastal fortress of Tyre, Saladin turned his army inland. Jerusalem withstood him for less than two weeks. In stark contrast to the earlier Crusader bloodbath, his occupiers neither murdered nor looted. "Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have bestowed upon them," he said...