Thus my mother, who grew up on the prairie of North Dakota during the Great Depression, spent time in high school memorizing the great thoughts and music of the ages.
They go on to assert that the best, tried-and-true method for doing so is engagement with the Great Books -- and the great thoughts they contain.
She wanted to preserve the people's experiences before outsiders began to affect the retelling, while the emotions were raw and the manner of expressing the feelings still required great thought.
Why let all those great thoughts go to waste?
The detective story writer Raymond Chandler, who gave great thought to the subject, called it "cadence".
"His heart is huge, and from the start he gave great thought to my career".
It was man's first great thought, the basic intuition of most primitive theologies.
Drawing parallels between the Soviet and American (and British, for that matter) experiences in Afghanistan is a popular parlor game, one that can be played on the cheap or with great thought.
Those era-defining pieces she wrote in the 60s, collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and still stunning almost 50 years later, were mostly done on the hoof, with no great thought as to whether they'd last.
