john william waterhouse the magic circle

“I can still feel our fear and despair,” Bromberger recalled nearly 60 years later. The situation, however, did not look promising. The Brombergers were desperate to acquire visas that would allow them to travel to Portugal. But now France had surrendered to Hitler, and Bayonne, too, would soon be occupied by German forces. They fled to France the month before, shortly after Germany’s surprise attack on Belgium.

On June 22, 1940, a 15-year-old Belgian Jew named Sylvain Bromberger and his family found themselves in a crowd of fellow refugees in front of the Portuguese consulate in Bayonne, France. His forthcoming book, “Ninety or Nothing,” is about an attempt to reach the North Pole. Michael Paterniti is a contributing writer for the magazine and a GQ correspondent. Even in her baby picture, you can see it: from the optical illusion of white mist around the moon-faced child, those dark eyes, ovoid and aglitter, reaching through and beyond the lens, her spirit already in fast forward.

It was her superpower, this blur, and it’s what drove her from place to place, lover to lover, world record to record, stunt to stunt. (Her mother, in fact, gave permission for the laundry-chute drops.) She lived her life - all the many lives in one - in a constant blur. We must imagine the child’s excitement, picking up speed as she drops, the adrenalized feeling of velocity and acceleration, of near-free-fall, and then, energetic bundle that she is, shooting back into the light, in a blur, the dirty laundry acting as an airbag, the yelp of joy as she lands on earth again.įrom the start, there was nothing illicit about O’Neil’s daredevilry. In the upper reaches of her grandparents’ Texas mansion, she climbed through the trap door of a laundry chute, hovering between brightness and the dark industrial maw, then simply let go. The very first stunt performed by Kitty O’Neil - or at least the first one she could remember - came when she was 4 years old. championship game, had dominated the previous decade and reeked of the imperiousness that came with being anointed “America’s Team.”īenoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a contributing writer for the magazine. The Dallas Cowboys, the 49ers’ opponent in that night’s N.F.C. Network analyst Michael Silver, who grew up a 49ers fan. It was 1982, and the San Francisco 49ers were still “lovable losers destined to break your heart,” recalls the longtime sportswriter and N.F.L. Targeting Solomon was typically a better bet, except in the last minute of the fourth quarter on that chilly January night at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, when Solomon slipped on the soggy grass. The Clark option rarely worked in practice - Joe Montana would throw the ball too high or too low.

The primary target was the speedy Freddie Solomon the second was Dwight Clark, a wide receiver no one except the San Francisco 49ers’ coach, Bill Walsh, thought could be an N.F.L. The play that led to the pass that led to The Catch was called Sprint Right Option.

John william waterhouse the magic circle