Wherein the Greatness, Littleness, and Lastingness of Bodies are freely handled.

For five cents I could buy five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious lastingness.

The love of non-urban places is about stillness, lastingness, subtlety, silence and the blessed lack of buzz, the non-demonstrativeness of the loved thing.

When one knows just what the consequences of his upset will be, the jolt is even more severe than upon first viewing, and isn't that but one measure of a play's lastingness?

A few poems here have the easy geniality - and the lastingness - of a "Have a nice day" called by a sales clerk of a convenience store as you step out the door with a half-gallon of milk.

Fear reminds you of your mortality, so in answer, lust ensures some fragmentary sense of immortality-though a pale shadow of the true lastingness to be found in our recording of your selves, of course.

If it feels like an extreme observation - and, in parts, not unprescient for the great financial débâcles of the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries - Johnson was also voicing an intellectual's fashionable enquiry into the lastingness of common interest.

His recent reinstallation of the post-1950's works in the museum's permanent collection concludes memorably with her "Painters Progress" (1981), in which a 10-foot-tall artist's palette that has been shattered and put back together again might seem to be an emblem of the lastingness of painting.