Word: montezuma
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...almost six feet tall, weighed only 130 Ibs., had hawklike features and a glance so concentrated as to seem ferocious. He got a job copying in a lawyer's office. Electrified by reading Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, he studied Spanish, began writing a novel about Montezuma in a blank book one wintry night. He became a political reporter, for substantial fees helped lazy legislators draft their bills, became second sergeant in his home-town rifle company, and failed his bar examination. "Goodbye," said his father, when he marched away to the Mexican War, "come back...
...intense concentration and as if drinking in the light, his thick and shiny hair, his stubborn forehead, his tightly shut lips conveying an expression of cruelty ... in fact, his whole being suggested that he was of exotic birth. More than once as I looked at him, I thought of ... Montezuma whose practiced hand could in a single day sacrifice three thousand human creatures on the pyramid-like Altar...
...taught composition at the University of California along with his onetime teacher, Composer Ernest Bloch, and often visits France's Darius Milhaud, who teaches at nearby Mills College. In this stimulating atmosphere he has half-finished a third symphony and has begun a four-act opera called Montezuma. He started the Roosevelt symphony in 1944 at Princeton, was on the third movement (adagio) when Roosevelt died. After listening to Monteux play it, Sessions said: "It hit me with a bang. I think it the most important work I've done...
...latter-day Magellan could still be "the first to burst into that silent sea." No atomic-age Hernando Cortés would pose as a god to a modern Montezuma. Geographically, the world had been pretty well raked over. The only sizable blanks remaining were near the Poles, and they were mostly wastes of ice & snow...
...haunted and deserted for centuries, the mysterious limestone cities of the Maya crouch in the Yucatan bush and the Guatemalan-Honduran jungles. They were already in ruins when Hernando Cortes marched into Mexico 400 years ago to teach Montezuma's Aztecs a Spanish lesson. The names of those deserted cities echo with a kind of distant, mournful music: Tikal, Copan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Mayapan...