Word: elegiacally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...elegiac tone of Sontag’s retrospective is characteristic of most modern reflections on the 60s. By now, the decade has become the locus of an intense cultural nostalgia, a yearning to recapture the youthful enthusiasm that inspired such diverse movements as Beat and Psychedelic “Happenings,” New Wave cinema, and the political dissidence that exploded in May 1968. Part of this longing has to do with the sense of a missed moment: failing to generate a coherent intellectual program, the spontaneous activism of the American Left eventually dissolved into stagflation and Vietnam...
...other night, as I drove down one of New York's more conventional and lovable Main Streets - Bleecker, west of Sixth - looking at the glowing shopfronts and bustling restaurants and strolling pedestrians, I had a sudden elegiac impulse to register the scene and its details. Because, I thought, once a Depression descended, these same blocks would look and feel very different; in 2010 or 2011, I might think back to this particular evening - autumn! twilight! - and remember how sweet and jolly the city had felt and looked not so long...
...happy life really are. In one of his books, Vaillant writes of his subjects that “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.” It’s an oddly elegiac comment for a supposedly objective psychologist. Vaillant was especially affected by one of his patients, Case No. 47, who wrote that happiness for him was being able to say on one’s deathbed that “I sure squeezed that lemon!” An unscientific observation...
...tired I am of appreciating the gift of life,” Lepson writes.For Lepson, death is not the only form that dissolution between people can take. “The Poem of J” is placed between “Motet for Mom” and the elegiac triptych. The narrator remembers her past with the titular “J”—the things that made her angry, things that now seem petty—during an impromptu phone call after many years apart. In “Steps,” a changing...
...Reading the elegiac prose of one such as Victorian art critic John Ruskin, conversely, does far more to inspire genuine environmentalism than do blind imperatives to recycle. In his memoirs, Ruskin writes of the pristine Alps, meadows, and lilac trees of his childhood, noting that these were eventually paved through by railroads and left “filthy with cigar ashes” by travelers who “knocked the paling about, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of blossom they could reach.” Nature writing in cases like this is not mere romanticism...