Word: enigma
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...connoisseurs of enigma, there is A Dead Soldier by an unknown Neapolitan hand (all attributions having failed so far), which inspired Manet's Dead Toreador. The painting is a link between Caravaggio's shadow-theater and, through Salvator Rosa, the world of 19th century romanticism. It shows a young man in half-armor lying stiff and composed on the floor of a cave (some mountain charnel-house, perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible...
...never confirmed, and he accepted Bayreuth's invitation to lead Wagner's Christian allegory, Parsifal, in an opera house that, during the Hitler years, was a citadel of Nazism. "I wanted to go to Bayreuth," he explains, "because the only way I know to solve the enigma of Wagner's being a genius and an anti-Semite is to get as close to it as possible...
Take that great original cliche--Elvis as angry, pissed-at-the-world enigma. It dogged Costello for much of his early career and still somewhat haunts him today. He really has no one to blame for it but himself. Elvis first made his move during the late '70s, an epochal time for rock, with the Sex Pistols pointing their diabolical fingers at a vulnerable rock world and shaking it out of its mid-'70s doldrums. Although Costello was never really a part of the Pistols' punk movement, he found a comfortable niche anyway, "surfing" on the new wave...
...telephone ringing or a door slamming, she did not respond to subtler noises. A standard hearing aid was recommended, but Kam refused to wear it, relying instead on lipreading. Eventually, she graduated from college, married a lawyer from Long Island, N.Y., and resigned herself to being an "audiological enigma...
...gonorrhea do far more damage. But few modern ailments have altered so much basic behavior so quickly. Perhaps the reason is its sudden upsurge and incurability. As many family doctors put it: "It won't kill you, but you won't kill it either." "Herpes is a puzzle, an enigma," says Dr. John Grossman, a Washington, D.C., gynecologist. "The medical community doesn't do very well with viruses anyway, and with this one, our bodies aren't able to give us any assistance in killing it." All by itself, says New York Group Therapist Dominick Riccio, herpes has changed...