Word: enigmas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE IS a collection of essays called Hamlet: Enter Critic in which critics do their thing with what is perhaps the greatest work in English literature. They are essentially puzzled over the play's great enigma: what took hamlet so long in acting to avenge his dead father? Among the theories advanced are that Hamlet was fat, and consequently moved slowly in doing anything; that Hamlet hand an Oedipal relationship with his mother and therefore blamed himself for his father's death; and finally, an Elizabethan determinist interpretation that Hamlet's humours mixed in such a way that...
Know thyself, said the ancients. Man cannot know himself, say the moderns. He is the enigma of enigmas, a brute wrapped in reason, an innocent ensnared in sensuality, a master builder of societies and civilizations who wrecks them like a frustrated child. This is the underlying theme of British Playwright Edward Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is having its U.S. premiere run at Boston's Charles Playhouse...
...TIME is probably right as to the survival of La Cosa Nostra "until there is a popular revolt." Precisely why public indignation is a prerequisite to the enforcement of law remains an enigma. I had supposed the protection of the public through legal processes was the fundamental excuse for a government's existence. But if the weapon of public indignation is required to "knock off" the new breed of gentle hoods, let us indignate...
...Gypsy Moths is Frankenheimer's latest and most clinical conjugation of courage, a brooding tale of three stunt parachutists bound by the brotherhood of danger. Rettig (Burt Lancaster) is a moody enigma who gets his kicks by pulling his rip cord at the last possible moment. Browdy (Gene Hackman) looks like something out of Sinclair Lewis, a perspiring, frenetic showman who goes to confession before every jump. Malcolm (Scott Wilson) is a kid trying to challenge the deadening effects of a loveless, lonely childhood...
...Scheffer's vision, the whale, for all his mammoth visibility, becomes the ultimate enigma in the enigma of the sea: "A hundred chemicals and a million living sparks and a billion bits of drift, no two alike ... an endless, moving, thin, transparent soup; a cosmic stock forever old and ever...