Word: crux
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...shed the light of art too timidly, too meanly, too intermittently on this world that I was depicting. The crux lies not in the quality of such gifts as I have, but in spiritual hastiness, in the fact that we were blinded by tremendous events, deafened by cannonades, by roaring, by intensely loud music, so that at times we ceased to detect the nuances, hear the heartbeats, and so lost the habit of discovering that spiritual detail which is the living tissue...
...that night was very dark, man was far from home, he lacked inner strength to make the effort, and, besides, the right way was lost." It was this deeply felt mood of young man's pessimism that led him to abandon religion and embrace Communism. To Chambers, "the crux of this matter is the question whether God exists. If God exists, a man cannot be a Communist, which begins with the rejection of God. But if God does not exist, it follows that Communism, or some suitable variant of it, is right...
...enough lamentation. This Lampoon is, as I said before, another story. What's to be bitter? It's funny. And now, the palable crux of this innovation: four "distillations" of four Harvard publications. Caustic, sophisticated, sometimes subtle, sometimes slap-stick--honestly, they're just marvelous. A pity that freshmen, whom these parodies are designed to initiate, are unfamiliar with the archetypes, here so unmercifully stripped down to their naked pretensions...
...Crux. One alternative, already suggested by such people as France's Charles de Gaulle, is to neutralize all of Southeast Asia. But U.S. officials would have to do an awful lot of rethinking before they bought that one, for Laos is proof positive of just how badly neutralization can flop. Another possibility is to expand the war to North Viet Nam with bombing raids and guerrilla attacks. That, too, has its pitfalls, for the upshot could be massive Red Chinese intervention, and another Korea. Still a third option is to keep muddling, as the U.S. has been doing...
...crux of the matter is Viet Nam, and U.S. policymakers see precious few glimmers of hope that the situation there will improve. Perhaps the grimmest fact, from the U.S. point of view, is this: Whatever the shortcomings of Ngo Dinh Diem's regime, his ouster and murder have not accomplished the reforms they were supposed to. South Viet Nam's present leader, General Khanh, is trying hard enough to take hold, and in fact, Washington fears that if he were eliminated by a coup or a killer, there would be nobody left to maintain even the semblance...