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She has always fought it down, / that subterranean dwarf / that rises up. / She has tried to be / the keeper of perfect cottages, / perfectly embellished.
By Linda Lancione MoyerJune 1988“Suffering” is a word used to express so many kinds of experience that its precision of meaning has been lost. The Latin verb ferre means “to bear” or “to carry,” and “suffer” derives from it, with the prefix “sub” meaning “under.”
By Helen M. LukeDecember 1987They raised a shout of “Clair,” yelled things he did not understand, aped the way he walked and the awkward, nasal sound of his speech, made fun of how he wore his pants high on his corpulent midsection, called him “Baby Huey” and laughed.
By Robert EbischAugust 1987I am mesmerized by the photograph of my father, staring at me from solemn dark eyes just like mine. He is dressed splendidly in a striped suit and white shoes; I cannot tell the colors of anything else because the faded sepia tones of the photograph reflect only subdued lights and darks. A dandy, my father was, with a handkerchief in his pocket and a flower in his lapel, his dark hair perfectly parted on the side. There is an anger in the way he stands, and a shyness; the look on his face is sullen and inviting.
By Carol SummerJuly 1987Martha is talking to me quickly: she needs another doctor. This one won’t give her the proper medication. She has not been eating well; it is too difficult for her to get out in the snow with her broken foot.
By Andrew ShalitJune 1987When you look at history, you find that we’ve become a lot more merciful as individuals. There’s a paradox in that governments are becoming a lot more destructive, but ordinary individuals nowadays are much more compassionate than they were even a century ago. We have developed more delicate, more ethical sensibilities.
By Sy SafranskyApril 1987January 1987All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Goethe
October 1986If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
Hans Reichenbach
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