Word: elegiacally
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...believe that, don't we?" The title of the film is, in one sense, straightforwardly symbolic: as creators, Gielgud and Resnais share a god-like power to manipulate others, a power contrasting with the usual human helplessness in the face of life's confusions. But Providence's elegiac theme music underlines the irony of the title as well. Ultimately, Gielgud's providential manipulations--and, to a certain extent, Resnais's--are distorted by materials they cannot control. In that sense, the artist is really no freer than the rest...
Fizzles contains fewer jokes and suggests that Beckett's exhaustion with prose is more advanced than his boredom with drama. There are flashes of the precise, pedantic syntax that hilariously dismembered logic in such earlier novels as Murphy and Molloy, but the dominant mood is elegiac: "For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily." It is a twilight thought, stated carefully enough to stand up to the pressures of Beckett's singular vision: happiness is hard to bear...
...concluding Libera me had a rare blend of sweetness and power. The Brahms Requiem seemed cut from velvet rather than the usual broadcloth. Karajan's reading was a subdued rumination, a realization of the deeply personal utterance the composer drew from the Lutheran Bible. In the elegiac "And ye now therefore have sorrow," Soprano Leontyne Price seemed to distill grief and comfort into a burnished flow of melody...
...this elegiac exhibition of the art of a vanishing race has a leitmotiv, it is an elongated, galloping wooden horse carved by a Sioux and collected by a missionary. Wounded - by a white man's bullet? - the anguished animal seems to be flying forever across thousands of miles of American experience. It epitomizes an essential theme of American art and literature: nature corrupted and innocence defiled...
...elegiac note sounds throughout this collection (Hoagland's third) of splendidly diverse essays. Civilization has been bought at the cost of atavism; increasingly, man's only measure of himself is man. Yet Hoagland can examine such melancholy facts without shrillness or sentimentality. Instead, he serves as a patient guide to what remains. He writes movingly about the black bears still extant in Minnesota and the few red wolves at bay in southeast ern Texas. His description of the complexities and nuances of wolf society is enough to make dog owners marvel at the instincts buried in their pets...