Word: almost
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us take our earlier examination question, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent age he lived in?" The equivocator would answer it this way: "Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher, because his thoughts was merely a reflection of conditions around him colored by his own personality. Others, however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the grounds that his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before the horse...
MAHLER is always referred to as a post-romantic composer, which provides a beneficial point of departures but constantly lead to distortions. The traditional image of this period, which corresponded almost exactly wit his lifetime (1860-1911), is of a lavishly talented collection of artists, aesthetically stranded in the shadows of their majestic predecessors-especially Beethoven and Wagner-struggling miserably with their grandiose inheritance but succeeding only in repeating the great men's first thoughts, and eventually making a cult of lamentation out of their own shortcomings. Thomas Mann described this period of apparent artistic desperation and extravagance...
...every succeeding symphony: the Resurrection, for example, is a vast poem of death, vision of refracted horrors, moments of vernal consolation, primeval light, and a personal belief in redemption. Each symphony is an agon, so to speak, involving malaise and piety, desolation and transfiguration, the spectral and the immaculate, almost always ending in the reassertion of the nobility of the human spirit and the inextinguishable beauty of nature. Mahler felt everything and felt in with an intensity forever incomprehensible to people like ourselves who stalk through a stupefyingly drab and insensate life. He wrote, after conducting the Scherzo...
...fact, all his revolutionary life he and the police played an elaborate and almost stylized game. Whatever country he was in, some police, secret or otherwise, were keeping a wary eye on him. They were sure he was up to no good, but their problem was to catch him at it. For his part, the prince treated the police alternately with indifference and insouciance. Fortunately for the prince, they were mostly inept, often irritating, but sometimes diverting. There was one glorious day when he conned one of the Czar's gumshoes into carrying his luggage. The rules...
Well, crudely put, when people get to be thirty they sell out. Selling out means losing flexibility, committing yourself to immediate rather than transcedent goals. It's almost impossible to avoid selling out--so many things force the small time visionary into the prescribed mold. The mold slowly begins to harden and it gets more and more difficult for molded people to relate to the free flowing and unpredictable upstarts...