Word: ego
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...Ego-Tripping Rods. The painful difficulty of learning that lesson is made clear in Stephen Diamond's What the Trees Said, the story of a single commune located near Montague, Mass., just south of the Vermont line. Diamond's book chronicles how a cadre of city-bred radical journalists slowly adapted to life on an abandoned farm. For some of the ego-tripping rads, the hardscrabble experience was, quite literally, unbearable (one committed suicide). For Diamond, it was a solution with flaws-very like his far-too-cute journal of the change...
...Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, ego so often intrudes in The Name Above the Title that history is sometimes obliterated. Still, no other book has given quite so vivid a picture of the way Hollywood farms out its once infallible film makers. Capra, now 74, has not made a movie in over a decade. The kind of happy ending he perfected on screen, the whimsical triumph at the final fadeout, eludes him in life...
...confrontation had mortally wounded Miller's vanity. Far from home ground, he had no one to buttress his top-heavy personality. "Who would tell me I was good?" he whimpered when an Eastern colleague failed to respond sympathetically to his complaining letters. By this time his ego began to resemble a shriveled eggplant. Waves of anxiety paralyzed his will...
...still alive, however, for him to reject a monastic existence and declare for life, a risk that had to be played out somewhere between Stuart the rogue and Stuart the saint. And that is precisely the equivocal condition of Hot Springs itself. Miller's finely paced narrative of ego death and transfiguration freely mixes elements and intentions. Ironic self-awareness vies with variations on the old-fashioned confessional and conversion tale. Frank disclosures are offset by pretentious allusions to existential phenomenology that could have come straight out of Sartre's Nausea. But the most worldly aspect...
...stratosphere of price. It appears today that if the Met or the Fogg or Washington's National Gallery wants another masterpiece for its collection, it must be prepared to pay in the millions for it, and prices are driven up by museums outbidding one another in an ego race. This ignores a fundamental question: Who, exactly, does need the masterpiece-and why? A few years ago, the late art historian Erwin Panofsky spoke approvingly of "the unselfish rapacity of the museum director." As time passes, and as the use and function of museums come under more rigorous examination...