Word: excessive
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Voltaire failed from a kind of perfection. Everything came easily to him except a certain divinely vulgar excess. He was, as one critic complained, a "chaos of clear ideas." He accused Shakespeare of being "barbarous," "unbridled," "low" and "absurd." Exactly. And that coarse strength is what we miss at last in Voltaire. By his masterly demonstration of the farthest reach of reason, he finally showed how much lies beyond...
...world can't abide phantasy, fools, excess and dreams. The Bible and church history is loaded with all of these categories. Christ was a dreamer. The martyrs were excessive as they leaped at the lions and the flames. St. Francis and his little band of bearded, be-sandaled, begging Italians were fools par excellence. Phantasy? Look to the Apocalypse and the books of Daniel, and Ezechiel. Contemplation is a dream self-induced by asceticism or Godgiven ecstasy, but not too practical...
OPHULS takes us out of La Roude with a feeling for the characters whose precision excludes sentimental excess. He describes them in their gestures, their social situations, their physical settings, by the clarity of his dramatic and visual style. But it is impossible to avoid feeling regret for them. The control Ophuls maintains over this feeling makes La Ronde a perfect work. Never does he impose an attitude or an emotion upon his audience. His style rather becomes a persuasive totality which reveals itself to us as art while showing us particular loves...
...strong tendency to verbal excess reflects the essential Agnew. He sees things in black and white, and has an absolute passion for oversimplification...
...California everything seems intensified to the point of excess. If excellence and beauty are nowhere more excellent and beautiful than in California, it is also true that nowhere else is the bad so ugly and the ugly so bad. It is full of dramatic contrasts, but what is the essence behind them? It is changing at a dizzying rate, but where are the changes taking it? What is it that people do to California-or California to them? One way to find out is to be born there. Another is to play a latter-day Candide-an innocent...