Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Your Essay on the Hobson's choice of presidential candidates [April 14] omits a viable alternative: optional preferential voting that gives electors a second or third choice. Fearful, for example, that a vote for a liberal third-party candidate would be wasted or would detract from Carter's tally and ensure a Reagan victory, a liberal elector is restricted to the choice between Carter and Reagan. A similar problem exists for conservatives...
...first half of your Essay on ageism [March 24] represented an open mind, but you slipped into the closed mind of "vital use." The trap of our culture is believing that people can live if they are useful. What is important is not "being useful" but "being." We do not sell grandmothers' smiles in the local supermarket...
Vendler serves as the link between poet and audience; she listens for voices that sound like no one else, and then transmits them to her readers. In an essay on Stevens, entitled "Apollo's Harsher Songs," she isolates the poet's moments of brutality toward himself and his life "because brutality, in Stevens, (and in other poets as well), is usually a sign of extreme discomfort, misery, and self-hatred." Vendler communicates the bitterness and catastrophe that underlie many of his poems to her reader in an educational but unintimidating fashion, quoting from him dexterously--as if Stevens advises...
...central essay, "The Return of Eva Peron," he speaks to terrorists, to businessmen and government officials to find an acceptable history. But even Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's man of letters, fails him. Borges' writing is a series of intellectual games that strip away, rather than analyze, the meaning of words. "There is no history in Argentina," Naipaul concludes. "There are no archives; there are only graffiti, polemics and school lessons." He goes on to find history "less an attempt to record and understand than a habit of reordering inconvenient facts; it is a process of forgetting." Naipaul understands that...
Joseph Conrad is the only accurate historian Naipaul finds, and his fiction is the subject of the fourth essay, "Conrad's Darkness." He offers Naipaul solidity: well-considered ideas that have been tested, conclusions which Naipaul can trace to their roots. His writing is a welcome change from the rhetorical fantasies of Generals Mobutu of Zaire and Peron of Argentina. "Nothing is rigged in Conrad. He doesn't remake countries. He chose, as we now know, incidents from real life; and he meditated on them...