Word: enigma
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...remain on first reading upon a separate plane from the actual passage of these chronicled events. But a more leisured reflection upon the nature of this book may easily start thought coursing through the various strata of speculation from Gulliver and Mark Twain to Bradley and Pirandello. The terrifying enigma of the sanity of the insane or the falseness of reality leaves us with a shaken faith even in the surcease of our own transitory mutability. Herbert Spencer said "Not only is there a soul of good 'in things evil', but a soul of truth 'in things erroneous...
...wanted to go from one town to another, you had to take a train." Graduates of the Lytton Strachey school of informal biography may suspect Mr. Lardner of shoving fun at their alma mater, the way he takes liberties with prominent names and dates in trying to solve the enigma of himself in an intimate way. "The Taylor who was elected President," he says, for instance, "was Zachary Taylor." And then he goes on. "... while the Taylor that lived near us was H. N. Taylor, the feed man. No relation to the other Taylor...
...will be a queer trial. Judge Fred Raymond is a Protestant. Mr. Reed was born a Presbyterian and is a candidate for President. Mr. Ford, idealist, pacifist and manufacturing moralist, keeps his religion an enigma. William H. Gallagher, attorney for Attorney Sapiro, is a Roman Catholic. Mr. Sapiro, onetime orphanage waif and newsboy, once studied to be a rabbi...
...tragle results more plainly to be seen than among the minor German poets of the first half of the last century. Of these, Nikolous von Strehienan, better known as Nickolous Lenau, is a typical example. He was one of those unhappy natures for whom existence remains an eternal enigma. With a genius essentially lyrical and subjective, he was unable to raise himself above the tragedy of his own life. "No poet of Northern Europe," says Robertson, "expresses as intensely a Lenau the feeling of 'eternal autumn', of unrelieved depair. And it is almost always a tragic despair, rarely that withering...
Then Mr. Kent plunged into the enigma of the man in the White House, said: "As to Mr. Coolidge wanting another term, that is too obvious to argue. No President ever liked the White House better than he. No President ever wanted to hold on to it more. When he leaves, it will be because he has to. If and when he announces that he will not be a candidate to succeed himself, it will be because his prospects have faded and he is afraid to take the chance. In the last six weeks he has made his desire...