Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brazilians like to think that their country is so big that no abyss could possibly hold it. They may be right. With half of South America's people and nearly half of its area, Brazil is huge, rich, and living on the steep sides of an abyss...
Without Wheeler's superb actions, the play's tone of voice would not, of course, have rung so clear. The Smiths and the Martins establish the overly articulated diction of the whole play, but the abyss of the inane is never fully plumbed until Paul B. Price enters as the Firechief. He has come to put out a fire and finds instead the girl (the maid) who first put out his fires. He stays to bore the company with astonishing narratives. Price delivers his monologues as a child would; his manner is everyman's who comes for fire and stays...
...from the fascination of the mother, the incestuous longing for innocence, safety, death. In the dazzling comedies of his second period (A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night), he fights the inevitable war between men and women. In The Seventh Seal, he plunges straight down into the abyss of God and wanders there among the gnarled and leering roots of living religion. In his recent films (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light), God is present again and again but always in dreadful or ambiguous wise: as a spring of water, as a giant spider...
...small, intricate world of extreme feminine sensibility, a girl's refusal to have a dressy wedding can open on an abyss of revolt; the look of a new apartment can call for the fanciest flight of prose. Occasionally Miss Calisher seems to hover protectively over her characters. But that is rare. Most of the time she shows them off as a collector displays finely wrought curios, turning them skillfully this way and that to catch all sorts of light. How different each is from the rest-and yet how like...
Descended from a long line of scholars headed by his great-grandfather, who was president of Harvard and editor of the five-foot shelf, Eliot ignores headlines and the cold war and makes his study nature. What he finds-from the eagle-hung abyss below Delphi to the song of the local vegetable man-delights him, and he passes on his delight to the reader in prose that is sometimes eloquent, sometimes merely latter-day inspirational. "The stars rained down their incandescent spears in sharply patterned salvos upon Mount Pentelikon and me. Staggering a little with my face uplifted, rapt...