Word: deafness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you. When you get so old, people talk to you that way. That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way. And that's why you go and hide under the covers in the big soft bed, so you won't feel the house shaking from people talking to you that way. That's why old people die, eventually...
...trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries...
...took Meredith the better part of his life to catch on. Nevertheless, by the time of his death-May 18, 1909-he had come to a glorious Victorian sunset as the Sage of Box Hill. Almost stone-deaf, looking, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, like a ruined bust of Euripides, Meredith held court. When no one else was around, he talked to his dogs. In art, as in life, he was a nonstop talker, and it is the rhetorical, aphoristic Meredithian grand manner that finally puts off today's readers. Reading Meredith in quantity, Pritchett concedes, is like...
Things to Come. In truth, Tommy is a creation likely to cause a certain perplexity in the mind as well as in the middle ear. Thematically it is a parable about a boy who grows deaf, dumb and blind after watching his father kill his mother's lover. Because of his exceptional sense of touch, however, he becomes a pinball champion. Later, miraculously cured, he becomes a pinball messiah and finally the leader of a quasi-religious state. When he insists that his followers play pinball with their mouths gagged, their eyes blindfolded, their ears plugged with stoppers...
...young, who have been known to feel that parents and the leaders of the state are deaf, dumb and blind to them, Tommy has strong symbolic meaning. Yet its arrival at the Met, via the Fillmore East, several European opera houses and a record sale of $2,000,-000, is less a triumph for music than proof of the maxim that if you say something loud enough and long enough, people will believe it. Tommy is not an opera, of course, but an extended song cycle. It does have its moments: Pinball Wizard, for example, is explosive, driving, topnotch-hard...