Word: essayistic
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...many sparkling expressions in "first book of public prose" by Vladimir Nabokov that I have to give you some of them right away. Asked by an interviewer to comment on the recurrent linking of his name with those of Beckett and Borges: That play-wright and that essayist are regarded nowadays with such religous fervor that in the triptych you mention, I would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful robber, though. On Hemingway:...I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, bulls, and loathed, it. Comparing youthful expectations with...
ISRAEL WHY is a three-hour-plus French documentary that explains very little but testifies to Director Claude Lanzmann's feeling of deep kinship with the country. Lanzmann is not, like Marcel Ophuls, a film essayist of strong and disturbing insight, and he is not an especially acute documentarian either. He has caught some moments of warmth, others of search and irresolution and precipitate fulfillment, but the question posed in the title remains unanswered...
...notion of infinity was conceived, as was the zero, by the Eastern mind. Yet it seems a peculiarly Western need to determine the indeterminable. Scottish Essayist Thomas Carlyle once noted that man must "always worship something−always see the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite." At the moment, the something worshiped is science, and the something finite is quasar OH471, the blaze marking the edge of the universe. But before the poetic notion of infinity is crushed between the calipers of science, it is best to remember that quasars were discovered only a decade ago. More probably, what astronomers...
...best interviews are with two writers who are still almost unknown in the U.S. Octavio Paz, Mexico's most distinguished poet and essayist (TIME, Jan. 29), impresses the reader as one of the most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne...
...lend themselves to a more stylish treatment than do the concerns of some Marxist or mathematically inclined historians. Of course, plenty of men with Plumb's interests fail as literary stylists, and it is to Plumb's eternal credit that he writes as well as he does. The liberal essayist is a dying breed, and the essay itself seems to be a declining form, not replaced, certainly, by the new journalism, but perhaps superceded by whatever it is that Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe write. It is a little difficult to imagine J.H. Plumb writing the novel as history...