Word: distantly
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...Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Roughly half a million words long, this extravagant narrative is a faithful re-creation of the 19th century British novel -- lots of them, including Bleak House, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Miraculously, this bald-faced imitation works wonders. The author makes the distant world of Victorian fiction, with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness, as gripping as tomorrow's whodunit...
Offstage, the distant thunder of great events. In the background, an exotic city, sleepless, decadent and aswarm with corrupt and conniving characters. In the foreground, a displaced American male hides his latent idealism under a shady manner, and a displaced European woman hides her latent sexuality under the guise of loyalty to her husband and the outlawed political cause to which he has made a passionate and dangerous commitment...
This hypothetical (but possible) selection of wines -- all American, all good -- is singular in one respect. Not one of the wines is a product of California or New York, although these two rank first and a distant second among the nation's winemaking states. The sparkling aperitif comes from Idaho, the white wine from New Mexico, the red from Texas and the dessert wine from Pennsylvania...
...Hubble cannot focus on distant stars nearly as sharply as had been expected. Its performance was compromised by mistakes that were easily avoidable. That is clear even without the benefit of optically perfect hindsight...
...shape their future relationships and lives. This insight is not foreign to traditional psychotherapy. But unlike traditionalists, believers in codependence -- and the Anonymous philosophy -- enlist a democratic and emotional revivalism to uncover an individual's secrets. This populist alternative rejects the relationship between the weak patient and the superior, distant doctor or therapist. "We're talking about a group of people like myself who bottomed out so badly that we didn't have the time to waste on things like penis envy, Oedipus complexes -- however you pronounce it," laughs Beattie. "We were ready for some real basic stuff...