Word: grandeur
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Then something happened to Dick Knight. One autumn Manhattan's stock-market collapsed; but it was not that. He began to drink hard, and kept it up for seven years; but it was not that either. It was a delusion of grandeur, he thought later, brought on by too much money and power: that and boredom, the emptiness of going through the same old triumphs. Dick Knight began to act in a way that no longer amused anybody. He threw his weight around, wrecked his friends' apartments, kicked the windows out of a taxicab, got arrested on Fifth...
...real suppression arises at Harvard, the Committee for Academic Freedom would serve no function but to cast aspersion upon Harvard's present-day tolerance in the eyes of the nation's liberal press. This is not a very worthwhile stake on which to gamble the position of aloof grandeur which PBK now occupies in the eyes of Harvard students...
This quality, however, is perhaps necessary to the grandeur of the total effect. Sandburg's prose is mostly direct, savored, terse, with scarcely a perfunctory or a pretentious sentence. If it had a smell it would be leaf smoke on an Illinois dirt road in November. Closely-knit to the material, it has almost none of the lyric blurring of The Prairie Years (where he wrote of Nancy Hanks as "sad with sorrow like dark stars in blue mist"). Because Sandburg has been compared often to Walt Whitman, his mature portrait of Walt is instructive: "Undersized, with graying whiskers...
...will never be able to thank Nature enough for the scenic setting it has given to our beautiful city. It nestles in the grandeur of the stately hills which line the lazy Mississippi River along its upper reaches and is distinctly not on the "sweetgrass prairie," where TIME wishes to place...
...Harry C. Steinmetz of San Diego State College noted that, in environments where erroneous beliefs are trumpeted, something like an epidemic of paranoia (systematic delusions of persecution and grandeur) may spread, and that then large groups may become dependent on a paranoiac for their wellbeing. He mentioned, without naming, "a leading American research physician, recently returned from Germany, who tells me that a psychiatrist is in almost constant touch with the Fuhrer . . . that his Excellency suffers from paranoid manic-depression. ... It may be today that power does not so much corrupt as that the process of acquiring it maddens...