Word: epigrams
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...that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." François de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice...
Imagine that, buried in a forgotten carrel at the back of the British Museum, a hitherto unknown comedy by the 17th century playwright William Congreve had been discovered. Fancy further that his comedy was put not on the stage but on film, with every world-weary epigram and convoluted conceit intact. Such a notion must have occurred to the English experimental film maker Peter Greenaway. With The Draughtsman's Contract, which he wrote and directed two years ago, he has restored the Restoration sensibility. Here is a comedy-mystery laced with Triple Sec humor and stately, raunchy characters...
...French in an uncontroversial way. One might paraphrase Antishthenes: One can know such and such a Frenchman, but never Frenchness. As Zeldin puts it, the book's intent is to show "what absurdities follow" when one sums up the French or any other culture in a phrase or epigram...
...with economic ideology; it's hard to get impassioned or poetic about interest rates and budget deficits. Newsweek deserves credit for disentangling these issues of fiscal and monetary consistency from a more urgent one. "And the poor get poorer," its headline cried out, overburned on a more forceful epigram--the color photograph of a pale young girl, frail, lips parched, and with a gaze, projected out of dreary-blue irises, of a spirit struck with morbid hopelessness...
Editors Richard Lowitt and Maureen Beasley, too, begin their book on Lorena Hickok with such an epigram of economic dismay. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt...