Word: optimistic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...optimist," Lurçat says, "and my tapestries are optimists." His designs are filled with riotous color and movement; flocks of flitting butterflies, bounding animals and forests of flying leaves, all done in brilliant reds, blues, mustard yellows and jet black. Sometimes the optimism comes out with a reverse twist. One of his best works is a large (210 sq. ft.) affair with an evil-looking creature covered with yellow and black feathers facing a gaily prancing deer-and a legend: "So you will better understand unhappiness [which] is too stupid to exist...
Summer School officials are optimist about the registration situation main because applications from outside the University and Radcliffe appear to be as many as last year's. However, most of these applications will come in during May and June. Last year, 48 percent of the 2,763 total enrollment was from outside students...
Urbane and good-humored for all his zeal, Father LaFarge shies away from the title of crusader. The "one-track crusader," he concedes, has his place. He would rather be a "reasoned optimist." Says John LaFarge: "The world, as I see it, is a vast and agonizing school in the science of human unity. No all-inclusive program can be bulled through, but innumerable detailed and specific approaches can be made. Our mistake is neglecting the possible in our despair over the impossible. That, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say, is against the virtue of practical reason...
...Optimist. Edwin Arlington Robinson was the only sizable poet the U.S. had between Emily Dickinson and the poetic renaissance around World War I sparked by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. Robinson found the poetic landscape "flowing with milk and water." He injected the gall & wormwood of realism. In general, he celebrated the individual, not by tracking the footprints of great men, but by tracing the soul-prints of weak ones. The Miniver Cheevys, the Richard Corys, the fumblers, the failures, the souses were not freaks to him but symbols of man's suffering...
Nonetheless, he called himself "the damndest optimist that ever lived." And in his stoic dedication to his vocation, he certainly acted as though he was. When an early critic accused him of seeing the world as a "prison house," he retorted: "The world is not a 'prison house' but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks...