Word: promethean
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...hardly startling. Israel may represent the only people who have actually viewed the Apocalypse, but on Aug. 6, 1945, the rest of the world saw something that might pass for the Apocalypse until the right thing comes along. Hiroshima occurred, after all. No one dreamed Harry Truman's Promethean explanation: "It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war." At that time the bomb was thought of solely as a weapon. Some hold the dark theory that the U.S. used...
Trailing a Promethean plume of fire and smoke, the entire 18-story-high, 4.5 million-lb. package thundered off the pad, shaking the earth for miles around, a seismic jolt greater even than the tremors from the mighty Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. From the hundreds of thousands of spectators at the Kennedy Space Center came encouraging shouts: "Go, man, go!" "Smooth sailing, baby!" "Fly like an eagle!" "Oh my god, what a show...
Golding's attention to fires--with their Promethean connotations--is not incidental. Matty's only background is the fire, whose flames have virtually given birth to him. Like Prometheus, Matty must live separate from the rest, with an "unchildlike smile." He weeps adult tears--but much earlier in his lifetime than Ralph...
...certainly a shift from Modernism, but to where? Apparently, to "Manhattanism"-that fantasy-laden, Promethean language of shaped towers that produced the great monuments of the '20s and '30s: Rockefeller Center, Empire State, the Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond...
...letter to his German collaborator, Frederick Engels. More appealingly, there is a vignette of the whitebearded Marx trotting obediently on all fours round his London home, ridden by a five-year-old grandson. Marx's strengths and weaknesses are carefully chronicled: the affectionate relationship with his daughters, the Promethean capacity for work, the hopeless improvidence with money, the raging, pitiless hatreds for fellow Socialists who failed to follow his dictates. The least familiar persona is Marx the philanderer. Here he is, at 43, unrestrainedly wooing his 24-year-old cousin during a fund-raising expedition to The Netherlands...