Word: frailness
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Last week, at 79, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at home in Rutherford, in his sleep. He had been in frail health since 1950, and his death, his wife said, "was a long time coming." He had a physician's strong resistance to sentimentalizing death, but his poet's resistance was stronger still. Death, to him, was the enemy of experience, more shameful than saddening, and the dead were zeros that "love cannot touch." Having long treated patients as poems, Williams once said farewell with a poem that, in all his rash toughness, he might well have...
When the spacecraft passes beyond Earth's atmosphere, its real life begins. The shroud around it falls away; there is no air now to do damage. Gravity has fallen to zero, and frail antennae and solar panels can swing outward, pushed by feeble springs. The spacecraft absorbs sunlight, as a baby breathes air, and electrical energy pulses through its metal circulatory system. It is now a denizen of space...
...pressure pioneers, Amsterdam's Dr. Ite Boerema (pronounced Boor-uh-muh), did his earliest work with his smallest patients-"blue babies," whose red blood cells were being starved of oxygen. Born with defects in the heart or its surround ing great vessels, such children are so frail that drastic surgery can kill them. The sooner they can have a corrective operation, the better. Dr. Boerema reasoned that if he could operate under double or triple atmospheric pressure and make the youngsters breathe pure oxygen through a mask, their red cells would pick up more oxygen and keep their fragile...
...calls Roth's novel "overblown," but what limits the book to partial success is not its great size. Rather it is Roth's treatment of his hero, a tedious young English instructor who looks within himself and finds the world empty. Roth chose to write of this frail spirit in the first person, and trapped himself by accepting the instructor's lugubrious self-assessment...
...Memories, the images simply float across the canvas like some sort of exquisite flotsam. In the last five years, Okada's palette has grown increasingly muted, and his colors have a weathered look as if time had washed over them again and again, giving them that frail grace that comes only with great age. Nothing is consciously organized; it is Okada's achievement that, in the end, everything still seems in place. This is the chaotic logic of a remotely remembered dream...