Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mowat's adventure had prejudiced beginnings. Responding to complaints from hunters, his employers hoped he would prove wolves, whose bad reputation in lore and legend ever precedes them, were responsible for the decimation of the caribou herds of the tundra and offer a justification for lupine slaughter. Mowat found, in stead, that man was the predator, that the wolves, besides being agreeable and intelligent in their domestic ways, performed an invaluable Darwinian function in selecting out the unfit deer. All this Ballard shows in images of great but distinctly unsentimental beauty, stressing the contrast between the blundering ways...
Rose is hard on Dickens for his responsibility in this, the most modern of the bad marriages described in Parallel Lives. Her conclusion: "It is a story of survival merely and proves only, as Jung said about his own reprehensible behavior to a young woman, that sometimes it is necessary to be unworthy in order to continue living...
...soon as Eliot moved in with Lewes she began writing Scenes of Clerical Life. Lewes coaxed novel after novel out of Eliot, while buttressing her self-esteem and shielding her from bad reviews. Even the ostracism she suffered gave her time to work. As Rose points out, the author of Middlemarch did not have to give dinner parties or entertain weekend guests. Ellot's was a fate that women, especially those who write, may envy...
...wisdom to good sense and imaginative speculation. He studies quantum mechanics and realizes that it holds no mystic truths or fetching metaphors for him because he does not know the mathematics. Elsewhere, he bucks psychiatric doctrine and formulates a hands-off policy toward the unconscious: "It cannot be a bad thing to own one, but I would no more think of meddling with it than trying to exorcise my liver, an equally mysterious apparatus. Until we know a lot more, it would be wise, as we have learned from other fields in medicine, to let them be." Doubt...
Nature did not cast him to play princes. The watery eyes gave him a look both stoic and startled: in Kenneth Tynan's phrase, "like a Teddy bear snapped in a bad light by a child holding its first camera." The body was pear-shaped and the vocal tones were not; they pontificated, or quavered with sentiment. The hands rose and fluttered independently, articulating a sweetly deranged sign language. Ralph Richardson was no matinee idol?no ethereal saint like John Gielgud, whose beautiful voice could coax meaning out of a computer printout; no demon lover like Laurence Olivier, with hellfire...