Word: summum
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...more bombing got that. But a lot of these things are contradictory. Why does everybody get his slice? One, because the guy who is handling a piece of the action is thought to know best. Two, because this is the way to preserve the consensus, and that is the summum bonum...
...without Words I and Illuminations are curious productions. The first an accelerated and expurgated history of humankind. Paul Schmidt is The Man and for perhaps fifteen vaguely humorous minutes he clutches at the summum bonum. Then he declines, as do we all to a blasted heap of insensibility. It is worth the fifteen minutes, I think, just to see Paul Schmidt portray a blasted heap...
...Summum Bonum. When he entered Harvard, in 1932, David began to grow up socially. A friend remembers that "he was a pudgy 17, and every ambitious mother in Boston was pushing her daughter at him." At a dance during his freshman year, he met Peggy McGrath, the vivacious daughter of New York Lawyer F. Sims McGrath. Eight years later he married her, after a courtship consisting largely of dancing dates ("He is still the dreamiest waltzer in the world," says Peggy) and endless phone calls...
...Harvard more than any other school the belief in liberal education is inculcated; however, its tenets are seldom recognized as the credo of a faith, which rests on assumptions as unprovable as any other faith. Knowledge through scholarship is justified and constant questioning become the chief paths to this summum bonum. There are of course all the institutional trappings of a visible church; the hierophantic gamut running from teaching fellow to full professor; the sacraments of grades and commencement, the semi-monastic existence of acolyte graduate students, and ordained faculty...
...mortal and the limited in which alone value appears. Water has no value to a fish in the ocean--but in a desert: ultimate and absolute. Thus the longing for "eternal happiness" seems rather a fierce hunger for the actualization of value, for the full incarnation of the summum bonum in existence. It's not that the saints are pictured as consciously enduring beyond their bodies' last heartbeats--not just that they can go on cognizing--but that afterwards they are beatified...