Word: virginal
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...style of dress was the antichic of radical intellectuals of the '20s and '30s-drab, flappy and mannish. Her biographer gives no indication that Weil ever had lovers of either sex. Her single vice was cigarettes, and she suffered throughout her life from severe headaches. Red Virgin. Biographer Pétrement tightly knits the facts of Weil's life with the development of her thought. While still a philosophy student, Weil became convinced that evil lay exclusively in a failure of the will. She amended Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" to "I can, therefore...
Those who derided Weil as "The Red Virgin" were off the mark. She distrusted all forms of political organization, and shrewdly saw that Marxism was not superior politics but inferior religion. As a writer of rigorously reasoned essays, she stripped rhetoric down to cold realities. Most of her opinions were out of fashion with the European liberals of her generation. Like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, she early on proclaimed the naked truth that there was not a sou's worth of difference between Stalin and Hitler...
...patterns, including those of the left. Teenagers, she says, see the Communist Party as "practically in the government now and stressing all the old-fashioned bourgeois values." The young couple is equally scornful of sexual absolutes. "Twenty years ago," explains Ravera, "a girl had to arrive at marriage a virgin. Now she has to arrive not a virgin. Both are authoritarian...
Christianity. Though the conquistadors had crushed Juan Diego's people ten years before, the Virgin affectionately called him "my son" and said to him in the Aztec tongue: "Here I will offer all my love, my pity, my aid and my protection to the people." She ordered the Aztec to tell the bishop to build a sanctuary to her on a nearby hillside, where the Spanish had destroyed a temple to the Aztec goddess of earth and corn known as the "Little Mother." When the bishop refused, the Virgin made Castilian roses bloom among the hillside rocks, and Juan...
Over the centuries, the original opposition of the church, the skepticism of certain historians and officially inspired waves of violence against church buildings have not halted peasant adoration of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her brown face adorned the banners of the troops that overthrew Spain and those of Zapata's land-hungry rebels. Today she appears everywhere in Mexico, from cantinas to taxicab dashboards to countless adobes. But the original remains on Juan Diego's cloak in the basilica. The cloak is made of a crude cactus fiber that usually lasts about 20 years; this one is still...