Word: vividly
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When falling asleep, a healthy person may experience an alarming jerk that brings him suddenly wide awake, often with the vivid impression of a frightening dream, e.g., one involving a fall. Many peopie ask their physicians about these jerks, get some such explanation as, "It's your muscles relaxing suddenly as you unwind." This explanation sometimes helps, but it makes no scientific sense. The fact is, medical science knows little about the phenomenon...
Mademoiselle crammed her voluminous journals with vivid vignettes. One episode she understandably failed to record concerned Count de Lauzun who hid under the bed of Mme. de Montespan, mistress to Louis XIV, and later mimicked her conversation back to her word for word. Mademoiselle did describe the bloodiest battle of the Fronde, when she saw the Duke de la Rochefoucauld staggering toward her, "having received a musket-ball through his eyes and nose, so that his eyes seemed to be falling out, and he kept blowing the blood away as though he feared one of his eyes might fall into...
...beauty of its vivid-hued cliffs and luminous Blue Grotto, Italy's fabled Bay of Naples island of Capri owes its reputation less to its scenery than to two of its former inhabitants. One was the Emperor Tiberius, who retired some 1,900 years ago to a mountaintop villa from which, records Suetonius, "condemned persons, after long and exquisite tortures, used to be hurled, on his orders and in his presence, into the sea." The other was British Author Norman Douglas, whose bestselling South Wind (1917) painted a thinly disguised picture of Capri as a haunt of elegant wickedness...
...Still vivid in the memory of most Athenians is the day in May 1941 when 19-year-old Emmanuel Glezos slipped silently into the ruins atop the Acropolis and tore down the Nazi swastika that desecrated the sacred rock. With this first open defiance of Greece's World War II German occupiers, Glezos made himself a national hero...
Borrowing his pigments from this true story, one of Japan's leading novelists, 34-year-old Yukio Mishima (The Sound of Waves) has painted a vivid, quasi-existential portrait of an Outsider. He has also given his novel at least as many symbolic levels of meaning as the triple-tiered Golden Temple. In the U.S. the book is unlikely to match its Japanese success, but its underlying theme is far from insular-that beauty, and perhaps civilization itself, may inhibit and paralyze the will to live...