Word: zeitgeist
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MARTIN KING had made it at Montgomery, out of his father's circumspection and into the public mind. His philosophical explanation for his transportation into public prominence characteristically was rooted in an intangible, "the Zeitgeist-the spirit of the times." Besides being a nifty sublimation of his ego-it wasn't me, but I'm the one who sees and says precisely what it was-his reasoning, if taken loosely, does bear upon the issue. If taken very loosely...
...notion of personal destiny. A person who had had a less sophisticated philosophical exposure might have couched this notion into convinced mutterings about the will of God or the whims of Lady Luck-7, 11, or the Second Coming. King, however, spoke of being tracked down by the Zeitgeist, and his diction was a part of his appeal to the white media. His rhetoric, "the soft Georgia cadence" of his voice, and the non-violence of his actions were the stuff of which television specials are made. Entertaining without being threatening...
...Catholic exodus [Feb. 23] is also its genesis, its truth, its maturity. Out of this clerical Zeitgeist will emerge the pilgrim church of love, humanity and creativity, and on the final day of judgment I shall embrace every priest and nun who left for giving me the courage and the hope to remain...
...choice they seem to have made was inevitable; the hoary zeitgeist would have permitted nothing else. We have had now, for perhaps the past twenty or thirty years, a cosmic choice to make. And because we were thinking about the Cold War, and Third World nationalism, and civil rights, and black power and Vietnam, we really didn't notice that we were making a far more important decision than any our "problems" and "crises" were demanding us to make...
...distinguish a significant disturbance in the path of Barnard's star. And it was not until 1963 that he had analyzed his results carefully enough to announce that a planet-sized object rather than a dim star was orbiting Barnard. "I wanted to tread slowly," he explains. "The Zeitgeist-the spirit of the time-had to be just right...