Word: whim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ever forget or forgive him?-wrote the unflappable lines that still seem to embroider a motto on his age: "I am the master of my fate;/ I am the captain of my soul." The world, it appeared in those innocent times, belonged to the romantic individualist with a whim of iron. Even pessimists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche celebrated the indomitable will. Not to mention Horatio Alger...
Pall of Smoke. Most Sowetoians live there at the whim of the white government, and can be evicted and sent back to tribal homelands for minor misbehavior. Fewer than 20% of their tiny, boxlike houses have electricity, no more than 5% have hot running water. Usually a cloying pall of smoke hangs over the rows of houses from the coal stoves used for both cooking and heating...
...church was openly and honestly authoritarian. If some regulation was difficult, one knew that everyone was struggling with the same difficulty. Now we have the authoritarianism of the personal whim of some bishop or parish priest, and people are just as truly "stuck with it" as they would have been years ago with a decree from the Pope...
...Richard Cheney and by Ford himself. The President and Kissinger had gone over its outline in two one-hour sessions, and Ford had indicated his decision to support the revised policy at a Cabinet meeting before the Secretary left for Africa. Finally, the timing was dictated not by Kissingerian whim but by a long-scheduled United Nations trade meeting in Kenya (see THE WORLD); Kissinger did not just wander aimlessly into the Dark Continent...
...definitions, he can have no conclusions. The only possible meaning his unlimited overview can give us is an Alice in Wonderland rule of revolving logic: that the irrationality of madness is such that it can never really be defined or predicted, like an enfant terrible who out of whim kicks down any castle of philosophical building blocks that the inquirer might care to construct around him. Which is a perfectly valid point, though it hardly requires a book, as the five lines of the epigraph demonstrate...