Word: epigrams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ONLY IN HIS DOTAGE could Goethe have thought that "the eternal feminine draws us ever upward." What bullshit! I mean, it made a nice line for the end of Faust, and a useful epigram when sending flowers to a classy girl, but only someone deep in the throes of his impotence could ever really mean it. For Frank Wedekind, sexual relations were like some sort of rarefied body-surfing: exhilaration in the midst of a mortal undertow. Wedekind believed that the eternal feminine could only draw men upward by making them think that down is up, and then sucking them...
ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN, professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, long had faith in "economic development." In 1963, he wrote the highly influential Journeys Toward Progress. In an essay published last year, though, he epitomized contemporary disenchantment with the field, changing Toqueville's famous epigram from "A close tie and necessary relation exist between these two things: freedom and industry," to "A close tie and a necessary relation exist between these two things: torture and industry...