Word: wayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Shostakovich answers: "Just like that, so that they wouldn't get un derfoot." The blind men's songs had not been passed by the censor. "Mighty deeds were being done there," he adds with fu rious sarcasm. "Complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed ku laks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content." Shostakovich vows that some day, the people who were respon sible for this and similar "evil deeds" will be brought to account, if only before their descendants. "If I didn't believe in that...
...spectacle Like that. I was a formalist, a representative of an antinational direction in music. My music was banned, and now I was supposed to go and say that everything was fine. Finally I agreed. People sometimes say that it must have been an interesting trip, look at the way I'm smiling in the photographs. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt Like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions in a daze, and thought, When I get back it's over for me. Stalin liked leading Americans by the nose that...
...very hairs of your head," says Matthew 10:30, "are all numbered." There is little reason to doubt it. Increasingly, everything tends to get numbered one way or another, everything that can be counted, measured, averaged, estimated or quantified. Intelligence is gauged by a quotient, the humidity by a ratio, the pollen by its count, and the trends of birth, death, marriage and divorce by rates. In this epoch of runaway demographics, society is as often described and analyzed with statistics as with words. Politics seems more and more a game played with percentages turned up by pollsters, and economics...
...even more forbidding challenges. Voyager I, it seems, found a hot spot in the vicinity of Jupiter that is 300 million to 400 million degrees centigrade. Later, Voyager II, going almost 45,000 m.p.h., came as close as 404,000 miles to Jupiter's cloud tops on its way to Uranus-some 1.6 billion miles out there. Science now has an electron microscope that can magnify 20 million times and so can photograph a particle with a diameter of about 4 billionths of an inch. Computers can do 80 million calculations a second (and ostensibly 6.9 trillion...
...dollar bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times in a year, the fact that a billion minutes ago (A.D. 77) the Christian era had scarcely got under way. Still, such efforts to evoke the actuality of a billion are far likelier to give the curious a picture of an extremely tall stack of currency than of the quantity of a billion units. In truth, most mega-numbers (and micro-numbers) that fly by these days paralyze the mind...