Word: enigma
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...MEXICAN desert: austere, stripped, inhospitable and unforgiving--an enigma to all but its inhabitants. It dares men to tackle it and survive; the "Old Ones" accept the challenge and win the necessary sustenance from this grudging and barren host. Their faces wrinkled and cracked like the adobe they have stolen from the earth, these Chicanos lead a life radically different from that of most Americans. Here churchbells are prefered to the telephone's ring, John Chancellor is voted down in favor of radio music, Sundays are for praying and old women pick up trash by the roadside. Necessity...
...been so bitterly resented. Even now, incompatible reactions continue to thrive. With them swells the horde of over one thousand books (and counting) on Eliot--biographies, criticism, memoirs, recollections, analyses. T.S. Matthews's Great Tom is one more goose from this gaggle, peddling no easy answers to the Eliot enigma. Its value lies in its subject: As Ezra Pound said, "The more we know of Eliot, the better...
...Though she has never married, a regular on the party circuit says that "she has gone out with lots of fellows." Other evenings, including many Thanksgivings and Christmases, are spent at quiet family dinners with the Nixons. Yet all these bonds of closeness have still not completely solved the enigma of her boss. "After 22 years, I still don't know Richard Nixon," Rose recently confided to a friend. "I don't think anybody does...
...other hand, as played by Gian Maria Volonte (gratefully remembered as the title character in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), Mattei himself emerges as a fascinating enigma-proud, driven, a masterful manipulator. His sheer energy-and his peculiar sense of realism, which appears to have been a blend of cynicism and idealism-compels attention. A pioneer conglomerator, he headed a state-owned corporation and drove himself not for money (he apparently had no life, let alone luxury, outside the office), but for power and, perhaps, for love of a game in which he delightedly cast himself in the role...
Cappella is a much more complicated, complete work through which we will be able to examine the author's life. Horovitz has said that a work needs the total enigma in order to find the ultimate hero. Cappella is an attempt at that paradox--the only trouble is that that paradox would make Horovitz the ultimate hero...