Word: vision
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that this most Indian of leaders, revered as Bapuji, or Father of the Nation, means more now to the world at large. Foreigners don't have to wrestle with the confusion Indians feel today as they judge whether their nation has kept faith with his vision. For the rest of us, his image offers something much simpler--a shining set of ideals to emulate. Individual freedom. Political liberty. Social justice. Nonviolent protest. Passive resistance. Religious tolerance. His work and his spirit awakened the 20th century to ideas that serve as a moral beacon for all epochs...
...both right and wrong. Interest in the flesh-and-blood Mohandas Karamchand has faded away. We revere the Mahatma while ignoring half of what he taught. His backward, romantic vision of a simple society seems woolly minded. Much of his ascetic personal philosophy has lost meaning for later generations. Global politics have little place today for his absolute pacificism or gentle tolerance...
...World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
Jefferson was a creature of the 18th century; he was the man of the 18th century. A dozen powerful strands of the Enlightenment converged in him: a certain sky-blue clarity, an aggressive awareness of the world, a fascination with science, a mechanical vision of the universe (much thanks to Isaac Newton) and an obsession with mathematical precision. The writer Garry Wills has suggested that Jefferson believed human life could be geared to the precision and simplicity of heaven's machinery. Many of the contradictions in his character arose from the discrepancies between such intellectual machinery and the passionate, organic...
...power--a compound of rebel cheekiness, stylistic innovation and a tragicomic vision of media power--has never waned. It remains a work that seduces the young and inspires the old with thoughts of what the medium can achieve. RUNNERS-UP Day for Night by Francois Truffaut; Chinatown by Roman Polanski...