Word: microcosm
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though he would rather write about batons than bats, Cardus thinks that cricket expresses, in microcosm, the whole English character. "If everything else in this nation of ours were lost but cricket," he writes, "it would be possible to reconstruct [from it] all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of [the] Constitution and the laws...
...have the patience to keep track of the dozens of lightly sketched characters; others will gag on the implication that communism was the only answer to Mussolini. But A Tale of Poor Lovers is no U.S.-brand party-line novel. It is wise, involved and European-a swarming microcosm of social and psychological complexities in modern Italian life...
...common element in the Harvard community contemptuously dismisses the pinball machine as puerile idleness. But nothing could be further from the truth: the pinball machine is a metaphysical microcosm. It reflects, in miniature, the unchanging processes, the limitations which define man's Free Will as well as his victimization by circumstance. First of all, it demonstrates Necessity; there is a magnet, ever drawing the ball downward to let it finally rest in its groove, until it is again called upon to begin its course anew. There is Free Will when the movement of the ball fortuitously heads toward...
...years ago Harvard had two dance bands of its own. One of these played under the name of Russ Randolph, having reference to the western half of Adams House. As a matter of fact the Plympton-Bow Street area of those days was a New Orleans in microcosm, swarming with musical talent, and so it is no wonder that when the two groups merged the result was christened the Gold Coast Orchestra...
When the balloting began, America was heard and seen in microcosm. No one could hear the roll call of the states without feeling, consciously or not, that this was poetry, and of an epic sort: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado . . . Kansas, Kentucky and Maine . . . Nebraska, Ohio, the Dakotas . . . Vermont and Wisconsin and Wyoming. The voices from the floor were rich with the flavor of the broad land. They spoke with local pride: Georgia, the empire state of the South . . . the great, free state of Maryland . . . Virginia, the cradle of democracy . . . Hawaii, standing on the threshold of statehood...