Word: precursor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Precursor Sage. Many words in a given language can be traced to their root origins by a skilled lexicographer. The ancestry of proverbs can rarely be determined with scientific accuracy. Aeschylus was as familiar as Solomon with the proverb, "A soft answer turneth away wrath," but no one can say to what precursor sage both men owed the saying. It remains a mystery, moreover, why some civilizations are rich in proverbs and others are not. Why did the Incas, the Mayans and nearly all the Indian tribes of North America produce such a meager crop of proverbs, when the Spaniards...
...topics: with sketches, vivid description, and not a little humor below the surface. It is somehow appropriate that a chat about a Californian living in the midst of swimming pools, sprinkler systems, and ultra-modern cigarette lighters should conclude with a picture of this "professional Californian"--perhaps the precursor of a new civilization--sitting in his living room with a .22 rifle ready to blast into eternity the next squirrel that tries to munch from his laboriously-fostered grass lawn...
...play is immensely theatrical, sensuous and intellectual. Apart from being Pirandello's greatest work, Henry IV is a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd-the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerrilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in lonesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In a towering display of the actor's craft, Kenneth Haigh confers unbrooked, unhinged regality on the title character while coiling...
...creator seven years ago of the first shaped geometric canvases, Stella is looked up to by dozens of other young artists as a precursor of the whole minimal school of painting and sculpture. His new works demonstrate how far removed trend-setting art has become from any concern with society, reality, human interest or popular taste: the multicolored cartwheels, half-moons and pie cuts look as though they had been stamped out on a machine. They were, in fact, designed with the aid of a protractor and compass, although unlike many minimal sculptors, Stella still believes in executing his works...
Later, Presbyterian Blake admitted that "I went to Wittenberg on a church invitation, and I was shocked at the restrictions." For all that, Blake was encouraged by the willingness of a Marxist state to commemorate Luther in its own way, even in the dubious guise of a precursor of the proletarian revolution, and by the mere fact that East Germany's much-beleaguered Protestants were able to hold commemoration services at all. "The thing that needs to be understood in the U.S.," Blake said, "is that the church exists and lives in East Germany...