Word: bitters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...woman must resist the corruption of mad discourse. The argument of values in Troilus and Cressida, a singularly distasteful but revelatory play, becomes a murderous melodrama of confused abstraction and disfigured moral orthodoxy. Men have lost the traditional meaning of reason, action, pride, and honor, yet oppose these, in bitter debates between corrosive delusions. This is the historic worry of heroic song, Platonic dramatic dialogue-poems, Shakespeare, the Romantics, modern poets such as Pound and Eliot, and even of Mailer...
...same size, volume, and duration on television, that magnificent annihilator of moral distinction, which cuts us even as we ignore it. We consume our words, our dead and dying, with equal voracity, equal unconsciousness. A thousand exhortations impinge on man, who, if insensitive, can only grow bitter or self-wasting...
Homer's poem also treats the bitter matter of choice as the source of tragedy. The hero lived for honor, which had a social and a metaphysical nature. The social was reputation, the praise of other soldiers; the metaphysical was self-esteem, a search conducted amidst darkness for some less venal vindication of a man's being. Tragedy results from the impossibility of living reputably while searching divinely. For the Greeks this was essentially a conflict of religion, in which the waters of the physical world streamed into the recesses of mental yearning. Achilles believed that only the gods' honor...
...tragedy of Achilles is partially his bitter discovery that a man cannot will his own honor. He could neither ignore martial society nor realize his vision. The world could not please him, and it could not save him because it could not share his vision. To choose honor is to choose death...
...like separatism. A handful of black people say something about separatism, and the white community will play it up like it represents three-fourths of the black people. This doesn't mean the black people are not angry, bitter, and enraged, and wouldn't like to kill some white people. But in terms of organized war, it's completely out of the question...