Word: abyss
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...greatest poem, "Voyage," in a brilliant translation by Robert Lowell, concludes: "Only when we drink poison are we well-/ we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,/ to drown in the abyss-heaven or hell,/ who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find...
...material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss. That has been Beckett's destination all along. The wonder is not simply that he has persisted so obsessively at such a self-defeating task. Nor that he abandoned his native English for French and then set about retranslating himself. Most astonishing is the volume of high comedy...
...Pinter's silences and manipulation of tempo are crucial--they illuminate the dark spaces behind his terse, economical language, convey the Matchseller's power over Edward, and express (in The Dwarfs) Len's isolation and the abyss into which his attempts at communication disappear. Edward and Flora's stream of consciousness babble must be broken by pauses if we are to understand how he comes to destroy himself and dies a symbolic death, while she rediscovers herself and finds a new life...
...play is a subltly modulated blend of humor (verging on slapstick) with tragedy (verging on bathos). The Abbey's great achievement in the past has been its ability to stage O'Casey without falling into either abyss. While the production now at the Schubert does not fall from the tightrope acting the play demands, neither does it evoke gasps...
...Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868. The sun is hidden by a crag as though it were the unspeakable name of Yahweh. When Frederic Church painted Cotopaxi, 1862, he deliberately invoked the creation of the world-a panorama of sifting red light, boiling vapors, lakes emptying over the abyss, and a volcano in the background. Even when it was less convulsive than a Mexican volcano or the sliding lip of Niagara Falls, American nature could and did provide feelings of intense religiosity. A painting like Sandford Gifford's Kauterskill Falls, 1862, with its vast panorama of woods dissolving...